The NY Times Op-Chart for the past 10 years has singled out crowd-source as the verb of 2009, following Google as the verb of 2005 and download in 2002.

Take a look – bottom right corner…

Six years ago crowdsourcing was being sited as a trend, so the breakthrough to verb status marks a tipping point for us

Joking aside, we are headed into our fifth year of conversations with organizations on how they plan to lead in the future. The one-off conversations we had with visionaries in 2005 have now become the common mantra for ambitious organizations. Here are a few things we now hear daily:

- R&D no longer just for insiders – whether its world health organizations, or global enterprises, there is a broadly-held acknowledgement that reaching out to partners, suppliers, or the broad public is the new necessary means of invention for new products, new technologies, solutions to obstacles that have held back performance

- Blind product launches becoming obsolete – the high adrenalin sport of independently guessing what the market will consume or embrace is increasingly a game of yesteryear. Whether by inviting consumers to be part of an ongoing community that provides input on new needs and current product enhancements or running pre-market tests of products or product design/branding, the tools have become too simple and affordable for product and marketing teams to ignore.

- Employee discovery is going open – both by inviting employees of any role and rank to have a say in improving products, services and overall company performance and by utilizing crowdsourcing as a means to discover bright minds as next hires, open contribution technologies are changing how people connect with and drive organization’s growth.

As we look ahead and consider how crowdsourcing will continue to evolve in the New Year, we remain curious and humble despite our iconic rank as verb of the year alongside H1N1 as the fear of the year.

Happy 2010 everyone!

To all those following and supporting us at Chaordix – thank you for a great year! In just a short period of time we’ve emerged as the market leader in crowdsourcing thought leadership, proven methodologies and enabling technology! The conversations and projects we’ve had an opportunity to work on have been rewarding and inspiring to all of us here on the Chaordix team.

We continue to innovate in fostering crowd contribution of collective intelligence (wisdom) and crowd production (tasks performed by your crowd) by providing technology, crowd recruitment, moderation and crowdsourcing planning know how to clients. We’ve heard repeatedly that our vision for Crowdsourcing for the organization – whether an enterprise, non-profit, government or academic – is the right one, we believe it too. We are excited to be living out this vision with each of you.

The foundation of our belief system and what crowdsourcing affords each organization – distributed power, diversity and ingenuity – comes from the visionary founder of Visa, Dee Hock. He imagined & built an organization that could find the right balance of chaos and order.

What’s on our roadmap for 2010:

• Crowdsourcing gone multi – equipping organizations for multiple outputs (ideas, R&D answers, visuals and video) via multiple crowdsourcing models (contest, collaborative, panel led) will remain core to the value of Chaordix™ products
• The future is mobile – watch for news on our strategy in 2010
• Localization – with our recent partner announcements in the Netherlands, France, Italy – we recognize that crowdsourcing in each of these markets requires specific cultural and language knowledge.  Be watching for more announcements coming in the new year including South America, Asia and Europe.
• Our very own crowdsourcing – yep, we’ve done lots of it with our inaugural community cambrianhouse.com and others, we’ll be starting more crowdsourcing communities in 2010, including our own.

What are we most proud of? The opportunity to change the world for the better – from inventive and collaborative enterprise or community, to a non-profit making an impact locally or globally, governments that are accountable & transparent with their citizens, to academic institutions that invest in new solutions for a sustainable, safe planet. All of these are examples of successful crowdsourcing and we believe every worthy organization is or will be building their very own crowdsourcing strategy in the very near future.

From all of us at Chaordix – best wishes for the holiday season!

We look forward to an exciting 2010 with all of you – our customers, partners, collaborators and followers.

Team Chaordix

Innovation comes from listening AND interpreting what you hear. Traditionally, companies decide internally what to produce and offer it to customers. But there’s a market shift underway led by Dell, Converse, Amazon and others using crowdsourcing to ask customers what they want to buy before they build it.

WIND Mobile launched with an ad campaign that promised to put them in the same league as market driven innovators. On their website, they ask people join the conversation asking about what customers want, how they feel about contracts and their thoughts on fees. We were expectantly waiting for them to launch something DIFFERENT but it seems they’ve delivered a slight twist on a broken monetization model, instead of paying for your handset over the course of your contract, you purchase it up front.

If WIND Mobile was truly having a conversation with their customers, they would have come up with a better solution. It’s clear customers don’t want to pay as much as they currently do, whether it is up front, or over a three year contract. Customers see that mobile users in other countries pay far less than we do here in Canada. If we assume there is a good reason for this, shouldn’t mobile companies being trying to discover innovative profitable solutions that will save customers money as well?

I’m worried about WIND Mobile’s brand strategy for three reasons. First, they seem to be offering the same thing as everyone else, just packaged around “being nice” and listening. Second, they are creating a work-around for the industry, not innovating new solutions. Last, if their strategy doesn’t work, other companies interested in involving their customers in the innovation process will have one more failed example to deter them. It is kind of disappointing when what is possible with crowdsourcing could be so much more.

I attended the Gov2.0 online conference this morning and listened to 5 success stories on open government. I was really impressed with the quality of speakers and feel pretty inspired by all of the initiatives around web2.0, social media and the government. Jeff Nigbur, summarized this shift in thinking well during his presentation of the Utah.gov site, “Rather than having the media be our enemy, the social media portal has allowed them to be our friend.”

Here are 3 things we enjoyed from O’Reilly online gov2.0 conference this morning:

1. Unicef’s Merrick Schaeffer talked about the Malawi SMS campaign to fight malnutrition some of his tips were: always work with Open Source, follow agile principals, partner on every project, & develop local capacity. More info about what Unicef is up to can be found at www.unicefinnovation.org

2. Michelle Viotti talked about Nasa’s Be a Martian program around the citizen mapping of Mars. NASA has several crowdsourcing initiatives on the go including one with our friends over at Top Coder – an experimental programming competition to develop algorithms which would help NASA’s flight surgeons make better decisions on what might be included in the medical supplies kit of future long-term human space missions.

3. Melissa Jordan talked about the Bay Area BART and how a small investment led to increased traffic and more fan interactions. bart.gov shares data to let third parties build useful apps for Bart riders. She also taught us that “cupcaking” means constantly kissing and being all over someone in public places in cool-kid speak.

People we now follow on Twitter

I appreciated the comments and tweets from the following people during the conference. I suggest checking out

@unimps –  UNICEF developer focused on mobile phone /SMS development

@GEOpdx –  Geospatial Professional, Community Building Partner, Metro GeoGeek, Government 2.0, Father and Husband

@cheeky_geeky – Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo. Voted class pessimist (1993).

@laurelatoreilly –  Editor at O’Reilly Media focusing on various topics, including Microsoft and Gov 2.0. Co-chair of Gov 2.0 Expo 2010.

And @OReillyMedia, of course! By the way, O’Reilly Media tweeted this, “Thank you #gov20 online folks: Get 40% off with the discount code 4cast on print books and 50% off ebooks from oreilly.com” and you should take advantage of the offer. This was a free conference and we hope to see more of the same, but everybody’s gotta make a living, so buy a book.

You can’t crowdsource anything without a crowd, but what groups of people might you think about for your crowdsourcing initiatives? What qualifies as a crowd and how many people do you need to get the results you are after?

Crowds worth considering…

Your employees/stakeholders – crowdsourcing all aspects of your your business – benefit as much as possible from your employees’ knowledge and experience, ask them what you should sell, how best to operate & deliver, who to partner with, who to recruit and so on. Crowd size will be determined by the size of your company. The method is more important than numbers in this case. The key to success here is flattening your organization so that every employee feels they can contribute their ideas.

Your customers – crowdsourcing products & services – getting direct feedback from your customers on what they want to spend money on – Crowd should be made up of people who are already passionate about your brand, people who are passionate about what you sell and (if possible) a few people that think what you do is horrible. Constructive criticism is good! To make this work, you’ll want to make sure you are rewarding the people who are helping you strengthen your business.

The broad public including expert outsiders – crowdsourcing innovation – bringing qualified diverse thinkers together to assess and discover solutions has proven to lead to breakthroughs. To achieve the critical mass of hobbyists, hecklers and experts for new thinking, you’ll want a healthy sized crowd – think thousands or tens of thousands. To make this work you’ll need people with a variety of backgrounds, as everyone will approach situations differently.

Citizens at large – crowdsourcing public policy – bringing democratic practices down to a grassroots level. Crowd size is dependent on number of citizens in the jurisdiction (city, country, voting ward). You’ll want to structure things so there is a good cross section of those directly affected by the policy, not just those with a keen interest in being politically active.

Photo courtesy: WiggyToo