Ok, so mobile is just one of the many moving parts at play in how Chaordix’s views future of crowdsourcing, but we share Google’s belief that over the next few years mobile will be bigger than desktop. I had the chance to attend Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and as always, had my crowdsourcing hat on the whole week. Here are two trends in mobile and my thoughts on how we might see them intersect with crowdsourcing:

Interconnectivity - the biggest word of the conference. Everything working together, to help mobile users minimize their efforts. The idea is to have all of your groups and social networks all aggregated to one place - so when I’m on my mobile and look someone up, I see all of their information in one place. On the flip side, I can pull information about one thing, from several different sources. Think of it as RSS for all of the different modes of communication and communities. How this helps crowdsourcing: If a crowdsourcer is juiced on an area, they have the opportunity to broaden their footprint, without a significant increase in time spent. For example, a developer can join several crowdsourcing sites and get information on projects he is interested in - all in one place.

Apps - At Mobile World Congress, one hall was dedicated entirely to apps. While there are still plenty of fun (possibly useless) apps, developers are focusing on apps that make lives easier. For example, apps aggregating real time data and spitting out practical info for people - like Traffic information. Waze is a social mobile application providing free turn-by-turn navigation based on the live conditions of the road and it’s 100% powered by users. How this helps crowdsourcing: Mass adoption. Crowdsourcing apps that people can use everyday and almost become invaluable (I’m heavily reliant on Yelp.com when travelling, for example) really help define what crowdsourcing is. While most people understand the idea of crowdsourcing through examples of American Idol and iStockPhoto, the more they use it on a daily basis, the more likely they are to embrace the value of it.

Figuring out how crowdsourcing fits in to trends in different industries is a good way to understand how we can continue innovating. It is hard work, but we’re excited about all of the ways we can enrich the user experience for people using the Chaordix platform.

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.

We called our crowdsourcing platform Chaordix as a salute to Dee Hock, the founder/creator and former CEO of the VISA credit card association. He coined the term to describe the dynamic tension he’d set up in Visa: encourage as much competition and initiative as possible throughout the organization — “chaos” — while building in mechanisms for cooperation — “order.”

When we talk about crowdsourcing, we consider the same principles that Hock considered when creating what would become VISA. These principles are the foundation for any chaordic organization:

• What if ownership was in the form of irrevocable right of participation, rather than stock: rights that could not be rated, traded, bought, or sold but only acquired through application or acceptance of membership?
• What if it were self organizing, with participants having the right to self organize at any time, for any reason, at any scale, with irrevocable rights of participation in governance at any greater scale?
• What if power and function were distributive, with no power vested in or function performed by any part that could reasonably exercised by any more peripheral part?
• What if governance was distributive, with no individual, institution, or combination of either or both, particularly management, able to dominate deliberations or control decisions at any scale?
• What if it could seamlessly blend cooperation and competition, with all parts free to compete in unique, independent ways, yet able to yield self interests and cooperate when necessary to the good of the whole?
• What if it were infinitely malleable, yet extremely durable, with all parts capable of constant, self generated, modification of form or function without sacrificing its essential purpose, nature, or embodied principle, thus releasing human ingenuity and spirit?

Instead of trying to enforce cooperation by restricting what the members can do, the Visa bylaws encourage them to compete and innovate as much as possible. “Members are free to create, price, market, and service their own products under the Visa name,” he says. “At the same time, in a narrow band of activity essential to the success of the whole, they engage in the most intense cooperation.” This harmonious blend of cooperation and competition is what allowed the system to expand worldwide in the face of different currencies, languages, legal codes, customs, cultures, and political philosophies.

It’s a shift and one that is easier for some industries over others, but Dee Hock’s message is inspiring. Instead of looking to crowdsourcing as something that is taking away power, look to it as something that is enabling innovation - a complex balance of collaboration and competition bringing us new ideas.

To read more, pick up Dee Hock’s book, Birth of the Chaordic Age

I made a New Years resolution to give the Zen Coding plugin a try in an attempt to speed up html/css markup. We do a lot of in browser design and prototyping with markup at Chaordix so any increase in efficiency is a boon.

Zen Coding was created by Sergey Chikuyonok to allow elegant css style syntax for quickly constructing html and css markup. Before I go any further let me demonstrate what constructing a chunk of html with Zen Coding looks like.

ul#my-list>li.item-$*3>a

Zen Coding takes the above line and transforms it into this:

<ul id="my-list">
  <li class="item-1"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-2"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-3"><a></a></li>
</ul>

Okay, so that was pretty cool but anyone who writes code everyday can probably pump that out with a serious of shortcuts in their editor of choice. Let’s go overboard a little and show some power.

html:xt>div#container>div#header>div#logo+ul#nav>li.item-$*5>a

magically becomes:

  <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
  <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
  <head>
    <title></title>
    <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=UTF-8" />
  </head>
  <body>
    <div id="container">
      <div id="header">
        <div id="logo"></div>
        <ul id="nav">
          <li class="item-1"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-2"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-3"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-4"><a href=""></a></li>
          <li class="item-5"><a href=""></a></li>
        </ul>
      </div>
    </div>
  </body>
  </html>

The input to output ratio is huge. While impressive it’s really only useful if the syntax is easy to learn and construct. In my experience the learning curve has been steep and I was up and running in no time. Let’s walk through the syntax for the first example in this post to demonstrate how simple it really is.

ul#my-list>li.item-$*3>a

We can break this down very easily. Let’s start with how the list and it’s list items are created.

ul#my-list

becomes

<ul id="my-list"></ul>

and

li.item

becomes

<li class="item"></li>

At this point things should feel pretty familiar to writing CSS. let’s add some of the fun stuff.

ul#my-list>li.item*3

    <ul id="my-list">
      <li class="item"></li>
      <li class="item"></li>
      <li class="item"></li>
    </ul>

Using > we are have specified that the list items are inside the unordered list. We’ve then tacked *3 onto the list items telling Zen coding to multiply the number by three. Now let’s finish it off.

ul#my-list>li.item-$*3>a

<ul id="my-list">
  <li class="item-1"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-2"><a></a></li>
  <li class="item-3"><a></a></li>
</ul>

We have now used -$ to increase the number on the class name of each list item and used > again to specify a link inside each of these list items.

Alright, reading through that it may feel like a lot of mental math just to output some HTML but once you get started it’s easy and dare I say addictive. Once you get the hang of it you’ll be coding at warp speed!

Zen Coding supports a number of text editors and includes plugins for both HTML and CSS.

Checkout these links if you want to Learn more about Zen Coding:

• Zen Coding on Google Code
• Try a Zen Coding demo online
• Video demo of Zen Coding

photo by H. Koppdelaney