Outsourcing is soooo 2003. One of the most interesting books we recently had the pleasure to read is Crowdsourcing from Jeff Howe, whose work we were already familiar via his Wired blog. According to the author, crowdsourcing can be defined as the following:
The White Paper Version:Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.
It’s extraordinary how communities driven by common goals and interests are achieving much more that typical corporate structured enterprises, less expensively and effectively.
Being familiar with the open source community and its out-of-the box approach to many development problems it’s interesting how this methodology is impacting businesses and other areas unfamiliar, until now, with such unorthodox problem solving solutions. Plura will write more about this subject in the future, especially on how crowdsourcing may impact the architecture and design fields and, who knows, our own development process.
In order to complement a PHD thesis regarding the EDP Foundation, a major cultural promotor, it was solicited  a graphical compilation of all its events between 2000 and 2009.
