It’s time for another official midVentures event. June 4th on the midVentures terrace.
6pm - 9pm

This event will be more than a simple meet and greet. midVentures has invited crowdSPRING.com, ThePoint.com, InklingMarkets.com, and Cameesa.com to lead a discussion about one of my favorite topics: practical crowdsourcing.

Our goal with midVentures is both to provide ‘venture development’ as a technology provider, but also to host new venture discussions as a public think tank. That is why I have invited some of Chicago’s greatest minds in business, technology, and media to collaborate around solving problems by launching tech startups.

This year I ask the question: How can we bring the crowds into your company?

Crowdsourcing: “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” - Source: Wikipedia

Here are some questions that we at midVentures often bounce around- I hope these questions can inspire the conversations that create new startups.

• Will crowdsourcing work permanently blur the line between the ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of an organization?
• How do organizations jump-start a community of supporters and customers who directly contribute to their activity and promotion? Should companies pro-actively organize the public or is the public ’self-organizing’?
• When is the crowd smarter than the individual at solving a problem with tools such as inklingmarkets.com or innocentive.com?
• Noting the current economic conditions, what new web apps should tap the potential of an extremely talented but under-employed workforce?
• Will crowdsourcing and the lowered cost of ‘finding the right people’ cause professionals to become more or less specialized in their skills?

That’s off the top of my head. I hope the midVentures crowd brings some ‘applied crowdsourcing’ questions.