crowdsourcing - Page number 3

After the recent economic crash, many governments had to overhaul both financial structure and fiscal regulation. The majority, including the US government, formed a plan of attack using the same bureaucratic and economic venues in use for centuries. Politicians come to the table with plans and ideas based on their own thinking and research. Some use these opportunities to filter in their own agenda, hidden in layers of jargon and political colloquial, to be reviewed and passed (or passed on) by a body of politicians behind closed doors. » Read more

When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I've certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it's also because we adults aren't exactly singing the praises of the management profession either.  For example, in a 2008 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics among workers in 21 different professions, a mere 12 percent of respondents felt business executives had high/very high integrity--an all-time low. With a 37 percent low/very low rating, the executives came in behind lawyers, union leaders, real estate agents, building contractors, and bankers. » Read more

Open source programmers understand the value of freedom; the idea of "freedom of speech" and supporting licenses such as the GPL are the basis of thousands of successful software projects. Can these ideas be applied to other areas, such as the ages old discipline of classical music? The Open Goldberg Variations Project thinks so. » Read more

Is crowdsourcing the enemy of innovation? Four panelists shared their experiences in a SXSW panel this morning.

"Crowdsourcing is a blunt instrument," said Robson Grieve, moderator and president of Creature, which recently redesigned the Seattle's Best logo, resulting in quite a bit of customer reaction, similar to many recent logo changes from The Gap to Tropicana to Starbucks. Crowdsourcing encompasses a lot of ideas and practices that have a little bit in common.

Do we work for the crowd now? » Read more

Starting a business is always a bit of a gamble. But investing in a start-up is practically a guessing game.

“A lot of venture capitalists will tell you that for early stage investment they don't have any real way of knowing which businesses will succeed,” said Marc Dangeard, head of Entrepreneur Commons. “They might invest in thirty businesses of the same type for the one that will thrive.”

Faced with the difficulties of venture capitalism and start-up funding, Dangeard decided it was time to “take the ego out” of venture capital. » Read more

At opensource.com, we often talk about ways to build and nourish communities. But sometimes what you do right is less important than what you’re doing wrong. We dug through our archives looking for cautionary tales that show how communities break down—or never begin to flourish in the first place. » Read more

Leadership in most organizations is top-down. The CEO tells the VP, who tells the director, who tells the manager, who instructs his employee to do work. Culturally most people are conditioned to think that's expected. But open source communities rarely work that way, and that's one of the oddities people discover upon getting involved in open source--and often they need a period of acclimation to get used to it. It’s also certainly one of the strengths of open source communities, as well as one of the least understood functions, even among those in communities of practice. » Read more

I can't imagine a world in which compromise and collaboration could be more important than in an open source business model. The model itself opens a Pandora's Box of issues that create a minefield that must be navigated on a daily basis and makes those concepts critical to success. Think, for an instance, about a world in which one or many of the possible points of differentiation are freely shared—and some even given away—without condition to parties whose interests are naturally misaligned with yours. » Read more

Last week I received a heads up about a new web application launching today from a company called BetterMeans with an impressive goal: to build the infrastructure (processes, technology, governance, etc.) to make an open organizational structure like we talk about here on opensouce.com a reality.

From their website:

BetterMeans.com is a web platform where people can start and run companies in a new decentralized way.

The Zimmer Twins is a Canadian project that combines crowdsourcing with children and animation. And makes money doing it.

The site has been around for five years and accomplished quite a bit, but if like me, you're not Canadian and don't have pre-teen kid, you may never have heard of it. » Read more