Crowdsourcing and Cloudsourcing

Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data.

The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals.

The term "cloud" represents a set of external services on a third party network, usually the Internet. “Cloud process outsourcing enables businesses to gain access to people with specialized expertise, diverse business philosophies and unique skill sets; without extending their infrastructure.  Utilizing the ‘cloud’ minimizes time to project completion and maximizes access to the smartest global talent. Companies are quickly able to scale up and enhance overall performance.” The services can represent raw computing, storage, messaging, or more structured capabilities such as vertical and horizontal business applications, even community. These services are delivered over the network, but generally behave as if they are local.”

Crowdsourcing brings new perspectives to the market. Prominently coupled to  crowdsourcing is cloudsourcing.  Leveraging services in the network cloud to provide external computing capabilities, often to replace more expensive local IT capabilities. Cloudsourcing can theoretically provide significant economic benefits along with some attendant trade-offs. These trade-offs can include security and performance.

Posted by Jeff P. Howe on December 5, 2008, (who spoke at a general session at the ASAE Technology Conference last week); Jeff writes concerning a guest blogger Venkatesh Rao.  Venkatesh has the distinction of writing and review of Jeff’s book  “Crowdsourcing and Cloudworking.  “Besides being a regular correspondent and colleague, today, Venkatesh Rao, has the distinction of writing one of the most penetrating reviews of my book in print or online. Venkat does crowdsourcing research at Xerox, and has also been one of the most consistently interesting voices in the broad area of online collaboration, and I was pleased to have him contribute the following post….What happens when on-demand technology meets the crowd? You get the cloudworker: somebody who uses the power of work-anywhere-anytime technology to craft a my-size-fits-me career. The days when organizations carefully cultivated vast data centers consisting of an endless sea of hardware and software are not over, at least not yet. However, the groundwork for their eventual transformation and downsizing is rapidly being laid in the form of something increasingly known as “cloud computing.”

Why does the Cloud work?  Reduced investment in developing expertise mitigates the risk of launching new ventures or revamping old ones. Clients only pay for the services they consume. Our team partners with yours to enhance business value, increase competitive advantage, and shorten the time to market for new products.