The technology landscape has rapidly evolved since I moved to D.C. in the summer of 2005.  For many in the industry, such a statement might evoke an image of me crashing through an open door... still, this reality smacked me in the face just a few minutes ago.  With a bunch of boxes scattered around my office, I stumbled upon some aged notes I took on a company called InfoEther during my first few months here at Computech.  I had to pause, as I recalled my introduction to something called Ruby on Rails (at the time, a relatively new open source web framework) and the promise of distributed collaboration and co-creation.
Flash forward to today, and past discussions relative to the pros/cons of open source technologies and frameworks seem quaint, if not obsolete.  Building websites using Ruby on Rails?  The guys at Inkling built their predictive marketing platform using it (just as Hulu, Basecamp and other "must-have-bookmarked" sites on my laptop did).  In organizations of all sizes, crowd sourcing is in.  And so too the rise of web-based communities.  McKinsey recently noted in its "Clouds, big data, and smart assets: Ten tech-enabled business trends to watch:"

In just over two short years, Facebook has quintupled in size to a network that touches more than 500 million users.... More than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people, the Web is a fully mobile experience."

Co-opetition occurs when companies work together for parts of their business where they do not believe they have competitive advantage, and where they believe they can share common costs.  For co-opetition to work, companies need to very clearly define where they are working together, and where they are competing (wikipedia)

I'm a sucker for case studies.  While some from my b-school days still haunt me -- like structuring a leveraged buyout of Seagate technologies -- HBS recently published one that did not leave me searching for a shot of Pepto.  The brief, which examines Top Coder's model of competition-based software development, had me running to talk with former AOL and FINRA execs about how their organizations tapped TopCoder's reach into the global community of programmers.  I also talked about the practical application of this crowd-sourced software with a guy who knows a thing or two about tapping the collective intelligence of a community (Inkling's co-founder).

I'm still writing + editing a longer entry for DCSpring21 based on their feedback -- and I have my own thoughts based on my role promoting/selling our software development shop's services.  But before posting my two cents, I'd be interested to hear from others who have used TopCoder or are familiar with their crowd-sourcing tactics.  Pros?  Cons?  Great stories and words of caution?  Come one, come all... Thanks!

So I spent the day at the Reagan building here in D.C. -- captivated by the conversations and presentations sparked by the University of Maryland's Smith School of Business' annual CIO Forum.  What a day! Crowd sourcing... systems thinking... transformational leadership.  Not sure if you could ask for a better day -- at least, without getting back in the classroom.

From the first presentation (by Federal CIO Vivek Kundra) to the last (by Paul de Sa, the Chief Strategist at the FCC), the day proved enlightening + inspiring.  In between, during a panel discussion on "Business Models and Sector Transformation," Premal Shah (the President of Kiva) shared three Web 2.0 principles that guides his company's online direction.  At the risk of being labeled at leming, I'm seriously contemplating how to adopt the micro-lending non-profit's online strategy as my own:

• Create an "addictive" user experience;
• Make your actions radically transparent; and 
• Crowd source against constraints.