fundit.ie crowdsources funding for projects

Fundit.ie crowdsources funding for projects ranging over: art, craft, design, events, fashion, film and television, food, games, media and publishing, music, performance, science and technology...

Paraphrased from Fundit.ie's About page.

"Fundit.ie is based at 44 East Essex Street, Temple Bar, Dublin 2, Ireland. It is an all-island (island of Ireland) crowdfunding website for creative projects, giving anyone the power to help good ideas happen. It is designed to support greater individual giving to the creative sector; an area that up until now has been under-utilised. The approach serves to strengthen the bond between a creator and their audience which offers the potential for wider-ranging, long-term relationships."

Loughborough Centre for Global Sourcing and Services (CGSS)

The Loughborough Centre for Global Sourcing and Services (CGSS) undertakes independent research on the trends and practices in global sourcing of IT and business services. Its goal is to improve sourcing practices through on-going engagement with managers and policy makers. In particular, the centre is interested in understanding how individuals, teams, organisations and other stakeholders cope with: the centralisation of business and IT service functions through shared service units; the disaggregation of business and IT service functions through captive centres and third party vendors; the back-sourcing of previously outsourced business and IT service functions; and the emergence of new sourcing models such as cloud services.

For information about the centre see http://www.lboro.ac.uk/departments/sbe/research/centres/cgss/index.html

Working in Bangalore; an inside view of outsourcing

This series of films attempt to peel back the cover of what happens on the other end of the phone in Bangalore's software outsourcing industry.

"You're in a space warp where you don't know you're in Bangalore."

Is what we see depicted in these snapshots of work life in Bangalore really much different from what happens in our own work places? Is the software development industry marked by diversity of approach or is its culture, professional norms and values much more homogeneous than expected?

The films are available to purchase from www.der.org

Outsourcing reversal at GM

From Slashdot... "GM's new CIO Randy Mott plans to bring nearly all IT work in-house as one piece of a sweeping IT overhaul. It's a high-risk strategy that's similar to what Mott drove at Hewlett-Packard. Today, about 90% of GM's IT services, from running data centers to writing applications, are provided by outsourcing companies such as HP/EDS, IBM, Capgemini, and Wipro, and only 10% are done by GM employees. Mott plans to flip those percentages in about three years--to 90% GM staff, 10% outsourcers. This will require a hiring binge. Mott's larger IT transformation plan doesn't emphasize budget cuts but centers on delivering more value from IT, much faster--at a time when the world's No. 2 automaker (Toyota is now No. 1) is still climbing out of bankruptcy protection and a $50 billion government bailout." For more see Information Week (July 09, 2012)

Commentary on managing distributed teams

From the HBR blogs...

"Managers frequently ask for best practices for managing their global teams, and recently we've noticed some common themes. Here are the three questions that keep coming up again and again, and what the research tells us about how to address them..."
"...managers of virtual teams should have dual, complementary objectives: structure and socialize. First they must shift their teams' work practices away from the dynamic adjustment outlined above towards more structured coordination. Clear team-level work processes, output requirements, and group norms reduce the complexity of virtual team coordination from coordinating efforts across multiple sites to aligning one's efforts with a single, consistent set of expectations. Second, as the speed of today's economy means no team — collocated or distributed — can eliminate all such dynamic adjustment, virtual team managers also work to support and facilitate dynamic adjustment when it's required by promoting and encouraging informal interaction."

Reference: Managing a Virtual Team, by Mark Mortensen and Michael O’Leary (link), published: 9:52 AM Monday April 16, 2012

Mocality - crowd sourcing business in Africa

From the Mocality blog; how we built this business...

Quote: When we started this business, we knew that (unlike in the UK or US, where you can just kickstart your directory business with a DVD of business data bought from a commercial supplier), if we wanted a comprehensive database of Kenyan business, we would have to build it ourselves. We knew also that if we wanted to build the business quickly, we’d have to engage a lot of Kenyans to help us. So we built our crowd program that utilises M-PESA (Kenya’s ubiquitous Mobile Money system) to reward any Kenyan with a mobile phone who contributes entries to our database, once those entries have been validated by our team. Over two years, we’ve paid out Ksh. 11m (over $100,000) to thousands of individuals, and we have built Kenya’s most comprehensive directory, with over 170,000 verified listings. Personally, I regard the program as one of THE highlights of my 18 year career on the internet.
From day 1, we aimed to target all Kenyan businesses, irrespective of size. As a result, for about 2/3rds of our listed businesses, Mocality is their first step onto the web. That’s about 100,000 businesses that Mocality has brought online.

Links
Mocality site (link)
Mocality blog (link)

How about crowdsourcing your seed capital?

"Kickstarter, a crowdfunding platform for creative endeavors, was founded in April 2009... The unique all-or-nothing approach to funding has struck a chord with both creators and funders and is allowing enterprising individuals to bypass traditional establishments to create films, music albums, events, and even products. Kickstarter helped hundreds of projects raise millions of dollars in 2010." Mashable blog (link)

Further reading
Kickstarter "A NEW WAY TO Fund & Follow Creativity". Web site (link)
Kickstarter Surpasses $100 Million in Pledges. Mashable post (link)