CrowdsourcingHarnessing the Benefits of a Virtual Workforce

Michael MorrisSenior Vice PresidentTopCoder, Inc

[ ] What is Crowd Sourcing?

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[ ] What is Virtual Work?

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“A Community of Non-Affiliated Individuals Working Collectively and Individually to Create Value”

[ ] Global Collaboration

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This can be your project team.

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[ ] Why the “Old Way” is Broken

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• Assume 80% Reliable Resources

• Assume Success = On-Time and On-Budget

• Probability of Task Success is 80%

• Projects with 10 Tasks have a 10% chance of success

• Probability of Failure Increases Exponentially with each Task

• P(T1) * P(T2) * P(Tn)

Task 80% Probabilityof Task Success

Single Point of Failure

[ ] The Old Way

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Success

Tasks

[ ] The New Way

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• Replace a Single Point of Failure with Resource Redundancy

• Probability of Task Success Increases Exponentially with each Resource

• Projects with 10 Tasks have a 92.3% Chance of Success

• P(T) = 1 – (1 – R(r1)) * (1 – R(r2)) * … * (1 – P(rN))

Task 99.2% Probabilityof Task Success

[ ] The New Way

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Success

Tasks

[ ] The New Way

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Success

Resources

[ ] Competition Makes it all Work

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“Value can be extracted when top performance is the only thing rewarded”

[ ] Plug Directly Into the Power

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You now have the power to directly access our Global Community of software developers and graphic artists, who are ready to compete to design your web project.

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[ ] Plug Directly Into the Power

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[ ] Driving Innovation

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ESPN – The best programmers in the world get their hands on the most comprehensive college football game data ever compiled! How will your algorithm stack up against the competition?

Truveo – Truveo set the top developers in the world loose with the APIs to search and index a hundred million video clips and challenge you to build the next great video Truveo application.

Open AIM – AOL has teamed up with TopCoder to put the Open AIM APIs in the hands of the best developers in the world.

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[ ] Thank You

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Let the world compete… on your next application

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