The part is never as strong as the whole. That's the basic idea of crowdsourcing. For those new to the term, crowdsourcing has been defined at Wikipedia, the most successful, popular crowdsourced project, as:
Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design and distributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see Human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).
The term has become popular with business authors and journalists as shorthand for the trend of leveraging the mass collaboration enabled by Web 2.0 technologies to achieve business goals. However, both the term and its underlying business models have attracted controversy and criticism.
Now a group of unknowns, led by an evil genius is pushing a project to get the citizens of Austin engaged with the city. The project is simply called Open Austin, and its purpose is to use Austin and Texas' expertise to improve our city.
OpenAustin is a community-based effort to crowdsource the requirements and development for the new City of Austin web site using local software developers, marketing experts, and graphic designers that have been displaced from their jobs due to the current economic downturn. This will produce a superior web site for the citizens of Austin at a fraction of the cost of the city's lowest bid.
The idea may seem familiar to people who paid especially close attention to the Austin Mayoral race. Mayor candidate, Brewster McCracken, launched a similar project during the election called Ideas for Austin. The site is now inactive, and now that the campaign is over I can readily admit that Ideas for Austin was a moment were I was genuinely scared and glad to have Brewster McCracken in the race.
Having people engaged and talking about tough policy questions and offering real world and uncensored solutions is a good thing.
Open Austin can and will continue to the mission of McCracken's Ideas for Austin but it removes the political nature of having a candidate or campaign trying to actively organize what should be an organic and community based project.
Since going live, Open Austin has generated 57 ideas. Some of them already exist. Others, are totally original. In either case, OpenAustin.org, highlights either a need to make our current city infrastructure more user friendly or the need to create new tools to improve our rapidly growing city.
Projects like Open Austin are what make this a great place to live and work. Our creative community is an essential part of Austin and the more ideas we generate together, the more people we can inspire to get involved at a micro-level to improve our cities and neighborhoods. Together, we can both crowdsource problems and the communal solutions. By ourselves, political problems can be daunting, but together, we can find a resolution to any challenge.
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