Tom Lagarde writes:
I noted your post today about elance because I operate in the IT consulting world and am a huge believer in using distributed resources (there are many smart people all over the world). I thought you might find the company I used to work for and now partner with interesting: TopCoder. TopCoder was a pioneer in the crowdsourcing world. The big difference between TopCoder and elance type offerings is that while with elance you contract with a particular individual for work, TopCoder runs competitions, so that many people all perform the same task and you pay for the best one (so instead of one person designing your icon, you might have had 10 different people with different ideas submitting). They run everything from creative design, to algorithm, to bug fixing competitions. It’s pretty cool. I hope the new CTO of Mises (whoever he is) is open to using some of these new models for getting IT work done.