This post is cross-posted from the TechSoup blog. You can read the original post and any comments here.

Who can help? Has this been done before? What is the best route? How can this project be sustainable? Crowdsourcing is being used to help find the answers to these and many other questions. According to Wikipedia, "crowdsourcing is the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call." Organizations are crowdfunding, crowd voting, crowdsourcing jobs, and even crowdsourcing films (see Life in a Day). Presentations illustrating its use have also been made available at this year's CrowdConf2010.

Are you using or interested in using crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, or distributed work to drive success for your organization or project? The upcoming CrowdConf2010 is a promising event bringing together researchers, technologists, outsourcing experts, legal scholars, and artists to discuss the rapid growth in Crowdsourcing and the future of the evolving tactic. The event will include a series of peer-reviewed presentation tracks, posters, technology demonstrations as well as keynote addresses from leaders in crowdsourcing.

Submit your expertise

The conference organizers are currently accepting papers, demos, and posters on all crowdsourcing-related topics. Submit your paper, demo, or poster for consideration before the submission deadline of September 1. 

Starting this Friday, the NetSquared team will be at the South By Southwest Interactive Conference in Austin, Texas. The SXSWi conference is an opportunity for online media experts to get together for in-person networking and learning. If you're going to be there, we'd love for you to get in touch. Here's what we'll be up to:

Since the earthquake struck one week ago, there have been a number of technology organizations (from Google to Ushahidi to Frontline SMS Medic), working around the clock with the State Department on a coordinated effort, that uses technology to support the relief efforts in Haiti. The Extraordinaries is one part of this larger initiative.

Visit the Haiti support page here.

Crowdsource your design projects to get the most choices for your money

(This post is cross-posted on my personal blog)

On Thursday, I attended the unconference/open space portion of SOCAP09.  I found a few tech sessions that were relevant to the purposes of TechSoup, and as is always the case, I collected the business cards of some intelligent people doing good work. The spontaneous conversations in the halls, are really the reason why we go to conferences, right?

I just discovered the coolest widget on the New York Times website, and it's making me think about new ways to represent community opinion.