Audience blog and Twitter reflections on Getting Results from Crowdsourcing event

Last night was the Getting Results from Crowdsourcing event run by The Insight Exchange, the first in its SME Technology Forum Series. It was a fabulous night.

Tony Hollingsworth and Luke Harvey-Palmer leading their Expert Roundtables at the event

I’ll reflect more on the event and ideas raised later, but I thought I’d capture some of the blog and Twitter reflections on the event .

I believe this is a topic for our times. The future is crowdsourcing. It is the manifestation of the old idea of collective intelligence. The global brain has arrived.

We captured some videos of the keynote panel presentations and discussion – we’ll try to get them up before long. It was an awesome discussion – many really interesting points were raised. Back later on those stories.

First, just some of the response from attendees.

Lesley Barry (at least I presume that’s who @LifeStuffiKnow is) wrote a great review of the event starting with:

Twitter is useless, and does not have real world value!

I think not.

On a business trip from Melbourne to Sydney today, I checked my Tweetstream and noticed a tweet from @deswalsh mentioning the #TIEcrowd event ( Getting Results from Crowdsourcing, the Insight Exchange) in Sydney this evening. 10 minutes later I was signed up and looking forward to a stimulating evening, and I wasn’t disappointed. Thanks again @rossdawson for my Just-In-Time social everything fix.

Lesley goes on to give a great summary of the ideas at the event.

The surprise was that after I gave my keynote at Cisco Insights 2010 conference this afternoon (in which I talked extensively about crowdsourcing), Lesley walked up and said hi. That was what his trip to Sydney was for.

Tony Hollingsworth also did a great post on the event, including a description of the Expert Roundtable that he hosted on building online communities. He writes:

Now back to crowdsourcing. The Internet has allowed tools to be built which let us connect, collaborate, converse and build community. Why build community online? You can scale up your relationships for business success. Relationships add value to your network, to your brand, and ultimately your bottom line. I’d rather have someone recommend me to you, than me having to do all the recommending. How do you feel about “shameless self-promoters”? You know you’re good, so my advice is to demonstrate why to others, then they will promote you.

During the evening Paul Wallbank, who among his many hats is a columnist for Smart Company, told me he had a story all ready for the next day, but he would push that out for his thoughts, which he wrote up as The crowdsourcing revolution. Paul writes:

The global market is now at your doorstep, even if you don’t compete overseas. The question is, will your industry be going to the guillotine or one of those eating cake as the global outsourcing revolution evolves?

And to round out initial reactions to the event, here is a very small selection from the very interesting #TIECrowd Twitter stream.

@PWWorldAU Phil Sim talks about developing business apps using crowdsourcing – or cloud labour – in a SMB #tiecrowd. “Gotta learn how to do it!”

@miscx #tiecrowd getting specifications spot on, setting clear expectations, investing time is required for good crowdsourcing results

@g_flashman #tiecrowd matt Barrie from freelancer.com says crowdsourcing will change the way we work and our personal lives… Deloitte event Sydney

@paulwallbank “it’s important to differentiate between crowdsourcing and outsourcing” #tiecrowd

@hollingsworth “If I had unlimited access to labour at virtually no cost, what could this do to my business?” asks Matt Barrie @freelancer #TIECrowd

@hollingsworth Good point @lukerides about opportunity to outsource project management. eg 37Signals’ BaseCamp could do this. #TIECrowd

@g_flashman #tiecrowd issue with project managing large gps of outsourced labour. Some use basecamp – can anyone nail the project manager issue?

@g_flashman #tiecrowd “the better you specify what you want, the better outcome you will get.”. – matt Barrie , CEO freelancer.com

@PCWorldAU Always do a small preliminary project first, don’t choose the lowest bid, and use someone with 6mths experience on sites #tiecrowd

@miscx #tiecrowd managing intellectual property rights, confidentiality etc is pretty much the same in in/out/crowdsourcing

@gflashman #tiecrowd matt barrie: do not pick the lowest bidder, go for quality then price. Freelance.com had to raise minimum bid from $10 to $30

@miscx: #tiecrowd Outsourcing is about minimizing cost, crowdsourcing is about maximizing quality

@g_flashman #tiecrowd thanks for an interesting session – food for thought… I am off to start a crowdsourcing project management business!

The event was the first public airing of our Crowdsourcing Landscape, which we showed people and gave as handouts. While we didn’t want to have it on the web, it has been scanned and is out there. We haven’t launched it as we need to finish off the associated website Getting Results from Crowdsourcing – hopefully tomorrow. So please go to the website when it’s up and there’ll be lots of other resources available as well as the framework.

Lots more crowdsourcing content coming soon!!