This morning I had the pleasure of participating in my first ‘TweetChat’, as part of a Q&A session with the SmartSheet team (Maria and Brent), and Seth Rosen, from CustomMade.
If the terms Crowdsourcing and SmartSourcing are new to you, my hunch is that it won’t be for long. The idea is really to farm out tasks to large groups of people (i.e. millions of people across the internet), to have them help you complete them. In the past, this was very difficult, as you’d have to hire employees, temps, or ask for volunteers to come to your physical location. A few years ago, Amazon.com made it much easier when they launched their Mechanical Turk product, enabling software developers to farm out tasks to individuals, and to pay them for help completing them. But, it was still hard for non-technical people (like me!) to get this work done.
Enter SmartSheet, and their new SmartSourcing product, which makes it incredibly easy for non-technical users to queue up work tasks, have them farmed out to Mechanical Turk, and have them completed in minutes, all from the convenience of a simple-to-use web application (SmartSheet).
You can read the TweetChat summary of Crowdsourcing and Smartsourcing, and if you happen to be in the Seattle area, you can even take a Smartsourcing class with a local teacher. We’re hoping to add experts in other cities soon, and online smartsourcing classes as well (if you add one, let us know, and we’ll help you promote it!)