I came across this very interesting BusinessWeek article by Stephen Baker last week, which discusses how willing we are to do free work online, without even trying to receive monetary compensation for our efforts. Instead, he argues, we’re looking for different kinds of payback.
The non-monetary rewards most people who do these kinds of things, which include answering questions on Yahoo! Answers and finding weird buys to post to ThisNext.com, consist of things that we valued before we valued money, including praise and admiration.
For businesses and institutions hoping to use this massive emerging voluntary force to drive their own goals, the difficulty lies in determining just what it is that’s motivating people, and developing a rewards system accordingly. The difficulty is that much of the reward seems to be community-based, i.e., you contribute because you want to earn the respect of your peers, and to become an authority of sorts on whatever subject you happen to be interested in.
The article got me thinking about web working, and how much work I “give away”, as opposed to how much I receive compensation for.
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We’ve discussed numerous times the reasons we flock to services like Twitter. We like the sense of community, the sharing of info and the knowledge that we can tap into with just a few words.
Wouldn’t that sort of knowledge sharing and interaction help foster better communication within an organization as well? Socialcast thinks so and their hosted team messaging service is designed to do just that.
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Crowdsourcing is a relatively recent workplace trend that isn’t going away.
On the one hand, it definitely generates healthy competition, and companies stand to win out in a big way when service providers and freelancers are openly vying for your dollar. We’ve looked at some examples in the past, like 99 designs, a site where designers enter competitions to win contracts.
InnoCentive has a different take on crowdsourcing.
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A couple days ago I posted an entry about Mozilla’s new Fashion Your Firefox add-on promotional campaign. Among the apps listed was one that I nearly overlooked, but that now strikes me as indispensable. It’s called Thumbstrips, and it’s a product of Intuit Labs, an innovative new venture by the makers of Quickbooks, popular tax software for Windows and Mac.
I recently had the opportunity to talk with two Intuit staff members to talk about Thumbstrips, Fashion Your Firefox, developing for Mozilla, and Intuit Labs.
Tara Tarapata, Group Manager for the Intuit Innovation Lab, and Scott Williamson, Software Engineer and an early developer of Thumbstrips, both gave me the impression that Intuit is an organization staffed by passionate people who are trying to shake things up in software development.
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Six years ago, when I wanted to make a conference call involving five participants, Bell Canada wanted to charge me $0.55 per minute per participant, resulting in a $165 cost for a one hour call. All those participants had to be in North America and a conference call operator was involved. The moderator could try to “chair” the session but there were limited ways to actually manage who spoke. Any archiving of the session would rely on participants’ handwritten or typed notes.
Flash forward to today: iotum has analyzed the entire set of processes required for managing and moderating a voice conference call from scheduling and invitation to final archiving of the call for future reference. And they have researched today’s communications infrastructure, including web services and low cost voice connections.
They have executed on iotum CEO and co-founder Alec Saunders’ Voice 2.0 Manifesto. Today they are announcing the launch of their enhanced Calliflower Conference Call service - a fully interactive, complete voice conference call service that has been in beta for over a year.
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