During yesterday's class we discussed the issue of crowd-sourcing - how can an organization, company, or any other entity can leverage the power of other people in fulfilling their objectives.
If we look at this term with a broad view, crowd-sourcing can take many different forms:
- P2P micro loans that allow people who can't access banking services to start up their own business
- A company that out-sources certain tasks to many individuals. The collaborate work is fast and efficient in this manner.
- Leisure and dining review websites that present crowd opinions and more.
Recently, I have come to learn about a new type of crowd-sourcing: direct customer funding by the Patreon platform.
In general, people who work are either employed by a company or act as free-lancers offering their services to individuals/companies. In this sense, a free-lancer needs to offer some sort of product or service to an individual. The individual than pays for that long-term service or product.
With the evolving of internet and social platforms, people have started offering their services, wisdom, creations, experience online for anyone to consume.
Take me for example - I'm a software developer in intermediate level. My latest desire is to combine my interest in data vitalization development on the web using D3.JS with the newest tech available for web development - React JS. The two techs don't play well together out-of-the-box.
This one blogger, Swizec Teller, has started writing a book and numerous posts about combining these two together. Swizec mentions that he gained some insights about combining these two technologies from other persons, but mostly he's done alot of research and trail-and-error attempts.
Thanks to Swizec, I'm able to learn new skills. However, while it might take time to Swizec to publish a book, I think he should be credited for his efforts. He puts alot of effort into his work.
Patreon allows me to back him up by, let's say, 5$ a month.
Combined with other people direct back-ups, Swizec can put more effort into his work which in turn benefits everyone else with new knowledge and skills.
Apart form techy people, artists such as designers, musicians, authors and others can establish a successful crowd base that can back up their publicly available efforts.
Hopefully, with enough backers, Swizec can be less dependent on his payslip and more on his crowd of back-uppers.
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