TED has a new program this year called TEDx - local, independently organized TED style events. We’re big fans of TED, so jumped at the chance to sponsor our local version, TEDxYYC. It’s this Friday and you can watch the live stream of it, if interested.

Looking at the list of speakers, we got to talking about how TED and TED-style events are all about crowdsourcing ideas. Let me explain, with crowdsourcing projects, adding one more person doesn’t add incremental value, it adds it exponentially. With events like TED, the same thing happens. Instead of putting together a group of experts on one subject, the idea is to mash up all kinds of experts and listen to the resulting conversation.

Think of the possibilities. When looking to crowdsourcing to help solidify your brand, for example, looking to smart experts across a number of industries would yield a very different conversation than only asking current customers. When looking to crowdsourcing - or move to open - the local government, instead of asking local politicians, why not involve different people in the conversation. Local entrepreneurs, for example, might be a great resource for different perspectives.

Don’t get me wrong, going deep on one subject is important (hooray for dental conferences), but the opportunity to spark your imagination, or to see a problem from a completely different vantage is pretty magical. If we think of it as an online conference of great minds, what sort of crowdsourcing communities would you like to see?

Back in the olden days of Cambrian House, before “the cloud”, we, as with most startups, used hosting providers to host our sites.  This was typically costly, often requiring a long-term contract, and often took days to get a server provisioned.

Being a startup, money was always a concern, and having to sign long-term contracts was certainly not ideal for a startup that might not even make to a year.

Furthermore, what if your application takes off, and you need new hardware now!  (Yes, it happens.)

For us (and I’m sure thousands of other companies), the cloud was a godsend.  We primarily use Amazon EC2 and Rackspace CloudServers to host our Chaordix platform for our clients.  We host our demo sites in the cloud, allowing us to boot them up when we need to demo our technologies to prosective clients.  There’s no point in paying for running servers when they’re not doing anything.

We have developed our Chaordix platform to be quickly scalable, if needed.  With the cloud, we can spin up multiple new servers in a matter of minutes, reconfigure the platform to recognize a new database backend, for example, with all the other servers running apache behind Amazons load balancer.  Spiffy stuff!

photo by: kevindooley

So, you’re worried about using crowdsourcing because what you want to Crowdsource about is “sensitive”.   Perhaps you really want to use open innovation to get new ideas for products, but CEO is worried about competitors joining your site, and getting almost all of the benefit of your investment in crowdsourcing.    Good news, you and your CEO are not alone, and there are ways to keep you both happy.

First of all, your CEO is right to be concerned.  If you are investing in building your crowd and leading them in a process to build value for your company, you certainly don’t want your competitors to be “listening in.”

But, fear not:  we’ve got some experience here!

One very pleasing and interesting observation is there really isn’t any “idea stealing”  on crowdsourcing sites.   In our original Cambrian House community, the crowd was genuinely supportive and effective in helping people with ideas make them better, and was not out to steal them.  Take a look at Mob4Hire as a great example of an idea made better by the crowd.

That said, it still makes sense to protect the valuable information you get from your crowd.  Some of the ways we work to protect our client’s important information include:

• Creative use of private, invitation only calls, private areas within a site,

• Using roles, privileges, and reputation management within a crowd community to allow involvement

• Using “hybrid” crowdsourcing models which utilize a blend of a “contest” and “collaboration” model attributes to enable the positive benefits of collective wisdom without giving out the store secrets.

So, bottom line?  Don’t let the fear of someone else stealing your crowdsourced ideas keep you from using crowdsourcing.   There are many ways to keep your CEO happy, while delivering the benefits of open innovation to your organization.

Landing the job here at Chaordix just a month after graduating from SAIT’s now renamed Computer Technology course means while I’m no longer the newest members of the team, I’m still one of the freshest. Although I was looking more to get a job than to find a ‘home,’ I was lucky to find both a year ago. What a year it has been.

Before I started here I had never heard of crowdsourcing, I had filled out surveys in hopes of winning tuition money in school and done ‘grass roots’ surveys at previous jobs, but crowdsourcing…no clue. My first step was to figure out how people used crowdsourcing, which was good, because I had one of the best tools for that right in front of me, the code for the Cambrian House website, all of its communities and for Chaordix. We all work at one big table, so sitting around listening to all of the conversations about different crowdsourcing projects was a big help as well.

Once I had a good handle on what crowdsourcing can be used for, the next step was getting to know the code itself. We have a pretty powerful platform and that means lots of complex code when you are just getting started. On top of that I learned Java in school and here, we use PHP.  While both are Object Oriented languages there are subtle nuances that took a while to get up to speed on. The development team here has been more than willing to offer their help in growing me as a developer.

Now the process is coming full circle, we have a new member of our development team, and hopefully more in the near future. I’m looking forward to seeing someone else go through the same steps and challenges that I did. I’m also hoping this time through, I’ll be able to give some help, since I know all to well how it feels to be just starting out.