Geek Peek: report from latest IABC Wellington event
It’s that time of year when everyone in management gets a bit more squinty-eyed looking at their budgets. One particularly stubborn challenge can be the ballooning costs of proprietary software licences, which consume IT budgets before breakfast …
Former IABC Wellington President Simon Pleasants, reporting on IABC Wellington’s latest event, captures some of the highlights.
Chris Hall, IABC Chief Information Officer
IABC Wellington members and guests last week hosted IABC Chief Information Officer Chris Hall, over here from IABC World Head Office in San Francisco, at the Technology on a Shoestring event.
Chris suggests amongst other things:
- A full suite of office software — wordprocessing, spreadsheets, presentations etc: www.openoffice.com
- Manipulate all sorts of images with a Photoshop emulator: Gimp (for power users) or Irfanview (lighter weight)
- Create portable document format files with pdfcreator instead of Adobe Acrobat
- Stop that RAM-munching malware with Malwarebytes: http://www.anti-malware-2010.org/
- Get a multi-located team working together better with online collaboration tools … Chris mentioned Basecamp is useful, but there’s a small monthly charge.
- More happy delving in the cornucopia of geeky delight that is the open source community at Sourceforge.
Crowdsourcing – “it’s uncanny how good this is”
Chris was enthusiastic about the potential for business communicators to tap into collective intelligence to get stuff done – stuff that the organisation might normally do itself or outsource. This can translate into free labour for projects or free research to provide insight into customer desires.
In 2006, Time magazine chose “You” as the magazine’s 2006 Person of the Year:
“We’re looking at an explosion of productivity and innovation, and it’s just getting started, as millions of minds that would otherwise have drowned in obscurity get backhauled into the global intellectual economy.”
User-generated media such as blogs, wikis, Facebook and YouTube blur old-fashioned distinctions between suppliers and consumers, speakers and listeners, our clients and their publics. Communicators can now see each stakeholder environments as having “collective intelligence”, with understanding, desires, creativity, and insight. Indeed, this was the power that the open-source software revolution leveraged, showing that soliciting customer input can be done safely with large numbers of people.
IABC’s Chris Hall highlighted the relative safety of crowdsourcing. Despite “haters and wreckers” being apparently plentiful in cyberspace, “the dummies get drowned out” by the intelligence and good faith of the crowd. Chris sowed that it can be relatively easy to enlist large numbers of ordinary people to do complex and creative tasks, at significantly reduced cost. So long as you’re clever about it, and you know what you want to achieve and how you’ll measure your results, hundreds of people can help – and want to.
Chris reeled off some examples:
- Get heaps of people to test your website under real-world conditions at Utest
- Need to make something work? Maybe an interactive webpage? Gain access to a diverse, on-demand, scalable workforce – a marketplace for work that requires human intelligence at Amazon Mechanical Turk. (Chris gave an entertaining account of how the term was coined)
- Need something designed? 99 Designs.
- Low-cost freelance technicians, creatives, and business advisors: Guru
- How about an eCommerce system for selling stuff via a website? Magento
- Like the social networking of Facebook, but can’t bear the distractions and the privacy issues? Try Yammer, “a dead-simple collaboration tool that many companies use as a virtual water cooler. Yammer resembles Twitter, but it is totally private…”
- Gmail and Google Docs. Google’s suite of office software is easy to use, can be accessed from any computer, and — well, you know where this is going — is totally free. You’ll need a Google account, so start with iGoogle to amalgamate your RSS feeds and work from there, with google documents, google groups, and the rest.
So you can use crowdsourcing to help design campaigns, run ideas up a virtual flagpole, answer R&D questions. What do crowdmembers get in return? Many just want recognition, a sense of community, some are interested in gaining professional experience for their portfolio, others are looking to get paid, a bit, maybe later.
- Benefits: Crowdsourcing can mean better productivity and creativity, lower labour and research costs, less time doing research.
- Challenges: these folk aren’t employees; they neither want nor need to do as they are told; they expect satisfaction, recognition, and freedom; they demand time. For traditional top-down organisations such as Government departments, this shift in management culture may prove difficult.
PS … For sheer smart-Alecness, you can’t go past the possibilities of Let Me Google That For You, but don’t tell anyone I told you about it!