It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog, but today I feel inspired! Because today, in San Francisco, over 400 people convened at the St. Regis Hotel for this first-ever CrowdConf, a conference focused on the future of (distributed) work. So what IS that? (this link takes you to a clever little video on 5min which is a cool new discovery). Well, what we really talked about was the concept of “crowdsourcing” which was coined by Jeff Howe back in 2006.
Here’s how he describes it on his eponymous (crowdsourcing) blog:
The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
This full-day event attempted to traverse the commercial and academic perspectives of crowdsourcing and did an admirable job.
