Crowdsourcing for Associations
New models for mass collaboration
While Jeff Howe addressed the Association Technology Conference last week, crowdsourcing was not just the topic. It was also an active experiment at the conference. Here are some ways associations are harnessing the wisdom of crowds to accomplish tasks traditionally performed by staff and small committees.

Designing Education and Events
For their upcoming Nonprofit Technology Conference, NTEN croudsourced session submissions, then let the crowd decide which submissions to select.

Publishing
The IGDA casual games special interest group collaborates on an annual casual games whitepaper. Read the backstory from executive director, Jason Della Rocca.

Organizing Information
The Association Technology Conference Notes Wiki is a good example of a crowd organizing information. More collaborative note-taking for the same conference was happening on Twitter.

Unleashing the Cool Factor
Sometimes, it’s just about doing something that’s really, really cool…like AIA’s America’s Favorite Architecture project.

The bottomline is this… Crowdsourcing is about people, not tools. Sometimes it’s about forming a community around a task. Sometimes it’s about harnessing the power of an existing community to provide value. But it’s always about the people and their work. Keep that in mind, and your experiments in crowdsourcing will go just swimmingly.