After reading this Jeff Howe's book on "CrowdSourcing', i felt that 'community' is a 'resource' that i have wasted. Being in Learning and development, i could find multiple ways of using communities for fulfilling many needs of learning and development. Practically every functional expert can use it for some use.
Communities can be used for multiple purpose. Here are some of the uses the author has listed in his book:
1. Use communities for problem solving: Example of Innocentive is a wonderful example. Companies use external community to 'solve' their tough problems by offering monetary incentive. It could be very useful to visit this website, both as a user as well as 'provider'.
2. Use communities to do your work: Example of TopCoder is a very disturbing example, because this innovator has created a community of about 50,000 programmers to get the 'programming work' done for a client, AT&T. This example shows a how the nature of 'firm' is changing. US patent office is planning to use 'crowd' evaluate 'patents', a very radical idea.
3. Use communities to predict events like elections. A company known as 'marketocracy' is using it beat 'stock market'. Companies are using it even to predict next quarterly results. This is the most innovative use one can think of. Like a stock market, there is a 'trading' market for help you do this. For more details of how this works, you may like to read James Surowiecki's Wisdom of crowds.
4. Use communities to rate each other's work or each other's performance. This is called as 'crowd voting'. This is a common use of community and is a very useful proposition for companies, say for example, to evaluate their best talent. It rests on the presumption that 'A Dot net coder can evaluate another dot net coder better than any one'.
5. Use communities to generate ideas. This is similar to 'suggestion box', but is more useful when done with people outside companies, especially the customers. Dell Idea storm is the quoted example.
6. Use communities to 'fund' ideas: Examples of Kiva.org ( donors lend money for small entreprenuers) is an eye-opener.One wonders how people actually 'contribute' money for good causes and how this can be channelised for better use.
7. Use communities to fund ideas as well as create market: Sellaband ( fans lend money to have their bands create music albums) is a classic example of creating market for music album as well as funding it. Threadless is infact a better idea of creating 'market' within the community.
If you know of any other use, i would be glad to know.
