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Online outsourcing

Principle

New trends emerge based on previous needs. Today there is no need to move to another town/region/country to get the work done. This is even more true regarding tasks where no physical material is required : cognitive tasks. For such tasks like programming, web designing, accounting, ... getting the work done is tempting.

Still key problems inherent to such methods remains : trust, culture, social leverage, ...

Goal

The goal of this page is to study the new possibilities of outsourcing and offer the best solution with counter-measure for its lacks.

Generalist

Code oriented

Creativity oriented

Content oriented

See Collaborative Management Tools

Experiences

Entrepreneur side

• RentACoder.com and eLance.com reviews... from calacanis.com
• Anyone Uses Elance.com? Guru.com? Rentacoder.com? post in Evan Carmichael forum
• RE: Elance or Rent a coder debate on the best solution on TheVault.com forum

Freelancer side

• rentacoder.com - guru.com type sites enquiry in SitePoint Forums
• Do you use elance or rentacode on Pavlina LLC forum
• Several reviews from Positron Ideas Manufacturing blog

Goods practices

Entrepreneur side

• Automated Adjudication Workflow in Amazon Mechanical Turk
  • publish a HIT with 2 Assignments and compare the Worker results. If the results don’t match the Adjudication Engine publishes a 3rd Assignment and compares the 3 results to determine which results to accept and which to reject
• Tips/anecdotes/experinece for outsourcing web development work to eLance, RentACoder etc. from Ask MetaFilter
• Outsourcing Is High Tech's Subprime-Mortgage Fiasco - Is the U.S. Killing Its Innovation Machine? by Robert H. Hayes, Harvard Business Review blog October 2009
• Hiring Programmers: Screening Out Liars and Duds by Dana Oshiro, ReadWriteStart February 2010
  • Codility Automated tests of programming skills. Assessment of software developers. Recruitment software.

Freelancer side

• turkopticon places a button next to each requester and highlights requesters for whom there are reviews from other workers. Bad reviews let you avoid shady employers and good reviews help you find fair ones.
• FreelanceSwitch Freelance Advice and Freelance Jobs
• AllFreelanceWork Freelance Jobs & Community

Crowdsourcing

• Crowdsourcing blog by Jeff Howe
• Crowdsourcing according to Wikipedia, including a step by step process and a list of recent actors
• InnoCentive Open innovation community of smart, creative people who provide solutions to tough problems in business, science, product development, ...

See also http://fabien.benetou.fr/Events/DIBarCamp#crowdsourcing

Lessons from "classical outsourcing"

• ...

References/Studies

• Size of online IT freelancing market
• KPO, Knowledge Process Outsourcing
• Introduction to Peer Production (originally called 'Network Civilization') by Michel Bauwens, November 2008
• The Robot Made Me Do It: Comparing Three New Cyborg Q&A Services by Marshall Kirkpatrick, ReadWriteWeb, April 2009
• Virtual Economy Research Network (VERN) News, research and discussion on virtual goods, currencies and economies globally.
  • hosted at Helsinki Institute for Information Technology
• Slaves of the Cyberworld, JAVA FILMS 2007
• Human Computation by Luis von Ahn, Carnegie Mellon University, AAAI 2009
• Minds For Sale: The Future of the Internet with Jonathan Zittrain, The Commonwealth Club of California November 2009
• Wikipedia:The Nature of the Firm by Ronald Coase, Economica 1937

To do

• The more general study on e-resources
• Add geographical studies on the new trend by countries and their consequences (basically is cheap outsourcing from India/China a real threat to the "west", are the competences the same, etc)
• Find if there is something related in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search/Comparison_of
• Eventually improve the wikipedia entry
• Hirewall Takes the Hiring Process Online from RWW, March 2009
• eventually link to automation solutions and not just outsourcing involving human labor?
  • Jumpbox or system administration outsourcing, especially used with EC2
  • BitNami including RightScale for "cloud" installation
• txteagle Mobile Crowdsourcing
  • enables simple text-based tasks to be completed via text message by ordinary people around the globe.
• How to run experiments on Mechanical Turk The technical details, tutorials, walk-throughs, Decision Science News December 2009
• A New Task Market for Startups - micro work MicrosoftStartupZone 2008
  • example of captcha solving, cf Drive#captcha
• InnoCentive and its set of "Challenge"
• ICodedHere.com Portfolios for developers
• Top five tips for an outsourcing deal made in heaven by Nick Heath, silicon.com March 2010
• Are Crowdsourcing and Outsourcing No-Nos For Startups? by Chris Cameron, ReadWriteStart March 2010
• http://www.feedbackarmy.com/
• Techcofounder - Meet Technical Cofounders for your Startup online community of passionate developers interested in launching a new startup.
• Zoho Recruit Applicant Tracking System Software-as-a-Service
• CrowdFlower and its API
• Expernova Connects Business to Research
• http://www.jobsnfun.fr
• Zombal Scientific outsourcing