Crowdsourcing In Lieu of Outsourcing

The last couple of decades have seen a trend toward outsourcing versus traditional hiring to meet business needs. Coming out of the Great Recession, there is an even newer concept starting to pick up steam. It’s called crowdsourcing. Why not tap the power of the crowd when you have a specific task that needs a solution?

Crowdsourcing is a distributed approach to problem solving. You normally think of handing a task to a specific employee or to a manager who will delegate it to a particular employee. In lieu of that, you can go out and bring in a temp or contract employee or forget the employment model completely and hire an outside firm to do the work. If you want to sell a building, you contract with a real estate agent. If you want to build a building you contract with an architect and general building contractor.

Crowdsourcing works something like contracting with a local firm except that the world is your marketplace. Many tasks like web design, logo design, artwork, article writing, app development and so on don’t require someone located nearby. Pretty much anything you can do on a computer can be done anywhere on Earth. On the network, the home office in Beijing is just as close as the corporate office down the hall.

Isn’t this just another form of outsourcing? It is, but on a micro scale and with interesting payment options. What I’m describing is farming out your tasks to individuals and crowds, not setting up your own shop to get cheaper labor overseas or partnering with a major corporation as a service provider.

When you go out for services locally, you probably start with the Yellow Pages or an online directory equivalent. You pick from who’s available in the area so you can meet with them in person to describe the assignment, write the contract and review the progress & results. When you go out for services online you do lose the ability to press the flesh or get your hand around somebody’s throat - literally. But if you can get comfortable doing business without the physical contact, you open up a world of new opportunities - literally!

The biggest enabler for online contracting or crowdsourcing is having a marketplace were buyers and sellers can meet. It’s a lot less dicey than trying to conduct business in forums and chats. Fortunately there is a very large and established marketplace already available with 6 million members worldwide. It’s called Witmart. They’ve got the resources and the tools that make it easy for service providers and clients to hook up successfully.

Here’s where the crowdsourcing idea comes in. You have the usual option to offer a job on a contract basis where you specify qualifications, negotiate the reward, job content and completion date and then pay upon completion. But you also have the option to make a contest out it. You specify the job and the amount of the reward and let the marketplace have at it. You then pick from best solution or solutions and release the reward to the winner or winners.

Where does the contest approach work best? It’s for things like logo design, business card designs, website design, marketing slogans, promotions, and so on. These jobs need quick solutions, don’t demand a lot of time and effort, and the value of diverse perspectives is an asset.

Contracting is more suitable for bigger jobs that require lots of time and effort, need considerable communication and coordination and have many specific requirements. Often the work is done in stages with payment released based on meeting milestones.

Do you occasionally or regularly need to find someone to build a website, translate documents, develop an iPhone App, promote a brand or come up with a company logo and find it a big hassle? Your life could get a lot easier right now by checking out the freelance marketplace with verified high quality providers at Witmart.

Is There a Broadband Stimulus Job For You?

The government is deploying another $795 million of the broadband stimulus funding, and just in time. The United States has been lagging other countries, including Japan and Korea, when it comes to the amount of bandwidth available to businesses and consumers at any reasonable price. At the same time, we are in what has been dubbed “The Great Recession,” with unemployment stuck at unreasonably high levels. Could there be a win-win here?

It looks like there may well be benefits for both today’s jobseekers and the long term prosperity of the United States. One report estimates
that the new high speed internet build-outs will create as many as 5,000 jobs right away. That may sound like a pittance, considering the millions looking for work, but it’s a move in the right direction. It’s also likely that the benefit from these jobs will multiply as new broadband resources come online. Once the bandwidth is available, there will be the urge to put it to good use. That means more computers, more wireless networks, more demand for video, more cloud services, and so on. It’s the nature of investment. There’s a multiplier effect as we gain new capability.

I deal mostly with business bandwidth. Since getting involved in this field nearly 7 years ago, I’ve seen a steady increase in demand for higher and higher speeds at lower prices. I originally launched T1Rex.com to sell competitively priced T1 lines. These have been the staple of small and even some medium size businesses. But a T1 line tops out at 1.5 Mbps. Seven years ago that was still considered a goodly amount of bandwidth. Now many, many businesses are moving up to 10 Mbps Ethernet. The pricing is similar to what T1 lines used to cost and the bandwidth is high enough to support rapid file transfers, fast Internet browsing and real-time video. What’s just as attractive as the speed and the price is the fact that 10 Mbps Ethernet can be delivered on existing copper wiring.

We’ve got a copper-based infrastructure that needs to move to a fiber infrastructure. All that copper is thanks to an earlier government initiative to ensure that every business and home had access to reasonably priced telephone service. All that’s happened is that those analog phone lines have been re-purposed for digital transmission. It’s the same copper. Some of it has been in the ground for a century.

But copper has its limits. Ethernet over Copper is good for up to 50 Mbps if you are within a mile or so of the central office. If you are out in the boonies or have the need for more bandwidth, you really need fiber. That’s no problem downtown. It’s a big problem as you move away from the densely packed city cores. Why no fiber where there’s lots of copper? It’s because the lower the population density, the more expensive per drop it becomes to bring in fiber optic services. It quickly becomes too expensive for businesses and ridiculously expensive for consumers.

This is what the broadband stimulus is intended to help fix. The idea is to build out what is called the “middle mile.” That’s the span from the provider’s main points of presence to smaller towns, neighborhoods and industrial parks. From there, it’s not so costly to hook up the “last mile” to actual users. That last mile or fraction thereof might be fiber, wireless, or even high speed copper.

We really need to think of our broadband infrastructure as a standard utility. No one thinks twice about expecting electricity and telephone service to be available. In most areas, water, sewer, and natural gas hookups are a given. Fiber optic lines need the same status. Bring in a bundle with both copper and fiber strands and you’ll have the best of both worlds. What’s more, our nation will have the 21st century resource to continue being a leader in science, business, education, and health care. It’s what we’ll need if we expect to maintain our lifestyle in a world where other nations are deploying broadband Internet as a strategic resource.

Just the Tech Jobs, Please

Nervous about your job in this shaky economy? Just want to be looking around in case... gulp... the worst happens? Or perhaps you're an employer who wants to selectively, very selectively, add talent that's a perfect match to a specific need. In either case, you don't want to be fooling around with general job sites overcrowded with everybody and every job under the sun. What you want is just tech jobs from JustTechJobs.

JustTechJobs is an IT centric job search portal that is what it says: just tech jobs. When you visit their site, your eye will be immediately drawn to the list of recent tech job listings in the left column. I just took a look and noticed a few striking things right off the bat. First of all, every job on the home page was posted in just the last day or so. There were over 30 separate listings from all over the United States. Some typical job titles include "Mid-Level JAVA Developer", "Web Graphic Designer", "Lotus Notes Administrator", "Data Center Operations - Technician", "Marketing Manager", "Technical Writer", "Project Manager" and "Network Administrator."

If you don't see what you want right off the bat, use the search box to enter job title, keywords, or company name. You can do a search of the entire U.S. or target a particular state. An advanced search feature lets you limit the search to as little as 10 miles from a particular zip code. You can also specify the freshness of postings updated within only the last day up to 90 days, or all of them. Check boxes let you specify full time, part time or freelance/temporary positions.

As a job seeker, you don't need an account to search the listings on JustTechJobs. But if you do register you get additional features, such as email alerts when the job you're looking for is posted on the site. There are also RSS feeds available for jobs, by specialty or by location.

For employers, JustTechJobs offers a low cost 30 day posting with discounts for multiple job listings. Jobs are listed chronologically, so as soon as you get your listing online it pops to the top of the list. You can also make your job a "featured job" for an additional fee so that it appears on the homepage at the top of the listings for an entire week. You'll be able to edit your listing at will, so you can adjust the wording based on the response you're getting from candidates.

Do you need an edge in the job market as a potential employee or employer? If so, then take a couple of minutes and take a look at JustTechJobs - Connecting IT's Best.