Crowdsourcing…An Experiment.

The power of the people.  That is the battle cry of the internet these days.  The gathering of people online and the subsequent distribution of their home-produced content are supposed to be at the heart of the revolution we used to call Web 2.0.  We’ve all read a lot about the impact of social media on our world today (many times on this blog) but my Philosophy degree wouldn’t be worth the paper it was printed on (allegedly, since I didn’t bother to ever collect the diploma, and lets face it a philosophy degree was never going to be worth much anyway, but I digress) if I didn’t try to disprove the premise in order to prove it.  So that’s what I’m going to do. 

After some thought (admittedly not a whole lot of thought) I hit on the idea of testing one of social media’s darling children, crowdsourcing.  Crowdsourcing is really just a way of asking a large, usually unrelated, group to provide input, ideas, or solutions.  It truly is the power of the people and nowhere can that power be better or more easily applied than online.

So my first thought was why not crowdsource this whole process?  Being the social media junkie that I am I started by posting a question on my Yammer account at work.  That’s a work in progress and I’m getting some ideas from that crowd about what I should crowdsource as a way of testing social media and the power of crowdsourcing.  Are you still with me?  The idea ,or experiment as I now call it, is to crowdsource an experiment that will either prove or disprove the value of crowdsourcing. 

That brings me to, well somewhere, but my next step is to expand my crowd-cloud and seek input from this Blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn because these are the communities that I belong to.  So this is step 2 and I am now seeking input from you as to what I should crowdsource…so here is what I need:

• Please provide an idea for something that I can crowd-source (something like the logo on my blog, or new product ideas).  Post your ideas as comments to this post. 
• The next step in the plan is to whittle the ideas down to one really good, but easily executable, idea and then I will move on to actually execute the idea.  Its a two-step crowdsourcing experiment.  First get the idea from all of you and then do it…not that complex really but it should be interesting.