Are you Crowd-Sourcing?
In this week's newsletter:
Are you Crowd-Sourcing?
Networking for ideas
Recent projects
Will you be our Crowd?
Are you Crowd-Sourcing?
As you might expect with a workshop on on-line marketing looming I've being doing some reading around to make sure I'm up to date on current thinking - and a phrase that's cropped up a number of times is 'crowd-sourcing'. Essentially, this is the idea that the more people you can get involved in solving a problem or designing something the more likely you are to hit on a novel and effective result. I'm a little sceptical of how useful this is as I think the quality of results will always depend on the quality of your crowd, but I do think there's real value for independent consultants and small businesses generally in tapping in to the ideas and knowledge of other people.
Networking for ideas
In many ways this is the main benefit of networking, whether on-line or face to face. Other people have different approaches to life and business and the more new people you meet and exchange ideas with, the more chance you have of coming up with your own new ideas. I'm often amazed at just how varied the businesses are that I come across at networking events - and the stories of how people decided what business to start. I also find that approaching events with the aim of listening to other people's stories is much less daunting than going with the aim of selling and is generally more productive anyway!
Recent projects
On the theme of variety I've deliberately picked out some of the more unusual projects from the last couple of weeks - if they don't inspire you and you're looking for rather more 'bog-standard' projects then have a browse around on Skillfair to see what's available. Don't forget, once you're a member of Skillfair you'll get daily alerts of projects that match your skills and can contact the owner of any project on the site, so why not join now ?
Creative writers required, South East
Internet Marketing, Eastern England
Encouraging Women Into Franchising Support - Unpaid, South East
Associates needed with skills in quantitative data analysis , North West England
Rural and Farm Business Development, England
IT Director,Surrey
Anti-Racism Peer Leadership Training Programme, Northern Ireland
IT Solution for Art Gallery, South East
Evaluation of innovative service delivery project, England
Risk Assessments for Lightning Protection Systems, Scotland
Book on Dynamic FE Analysis , United Kingdom
Leadership and Management Development Training,Eastern Europe
Design of flare to biogas collection system,Overseas
Arts and Health Consultant, North West England
Online Application Management System, West Midlands
role play actors, London
Enhancing diversity in leadership, South West
Programme to measure solar energy output, Eastern England
Retail Offer Study, East Midlands
Press and Public Relations Support ,Greater London
Evaluation of Arts Strand of Health and Wellbeing,Greater London
Increasing creative and innovative capacity of businesses, Wales
Consultancy on SAP Implementation , London
Software Support for Oracle Project, South East
marketing materials for office development, Scotland
Will you be our Crowd?
We're very lucky at Skillfair to be able to use your collective experience and ideas to help us improve the service and come up with new ways to help you and other consultants. In that spirit we'd like to invite ideas for topics that you'd like to see covered at our conference in the autumn. It will be in London in November and we plan to use a similar format to last year, 3 or 4 short talks plus a variety of longer workshops, but we're really keen that the agenda should reflect the issues and problems you're interested in. So if you've seen a great speaker or have a topic that you think is worthy of a workshop session then please either email us or comment on the Skillfair blog.