Crowdsourcing: Products from the "people formerly known as customers"

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCM7w11Ultk]

Interesting (while promotional) video about the impact of Crowdsourcing on product development and change of whole markets. The author of the book he’s promoting with this trailer likes two definitions for crowdsourcing best:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

I liked a definition he offers in the video (near end) even better: “(the former examples) show how these successful forms of crowdsourcing came up organically from the people formerly known as customers, from people formerly known as the audience”.

By the way: Croudsourcing is a concept that has massively been played out in the sci-fi novel “Rainbows End” by Vernor Vinge, as my friends on FF know all too well ;-)