Moving beyond the increasing proliferation of conferences and workshops on crowdsourcing (for which I am partly responsible), we are now seeing a full week devoted to the topic, in Singapore in April 2013. It is a great choice of location given the pace of growth on both supply and demand for crowds in the region.

Details are at the Crowdsourcing Week website and part of the press release is below. Full disclosure: I am on the advisory board for Crowdsourcing Week and will be a keynote speaker. It promises to be an exciting event.

Crowdsourcing Week: Embracing The Power of The Crowd – Singapore, April 2013

Crowdsourcing Week, the first ever week long global event designed to bring innovation and efficiency to organizations by leveraging the power of “the Crowd”, will take place in Singapore in April 2013.

The power of participation
The changing environment of the new economy, mobility of working environments, connectivity and social media has led to crowdsourcing being a 21st century phenomenon. “Crowdsourcing is key to the future of our organizations as technology is giving more and more power and capacity for people to pro-actively develop new ideas and structures for businesses. We are confident that Crowdsourcing is the only sustainable approach to innovation” – Epirot Ludvik Nekaj, CEO and Founder of Ludvik+Partners.

We have created a set of slides to make the 14 ExaTrends easier to read and understand. The slides are better viewed in large size, so either view full screen or go to the slides on Slideshare.

What do you think are the most important trends of the decade, from this list or beyond?

We address the ethical issues of crowdsourcing in Chapter 5 on Relationship Value, offering Points and Counterpoints on a number of the major ethical issues in the field.

To bring the debate to life we have created a video providing some of the arguments on each side.

The four topics addressed in the video are:

* People should be paid for their contributions to for-profit ventures

* Professionals should not do unpaid work

What do you think? What are your views on these four issues? What other important ethical issues are there in crowdsourcing?

We are now releasing a series of short videos delving into the ExaTrends, starting with Reputation Economy.

Some of the issues covered in the video include:
* The amount of data we have now is enabling the measurement of reputation
* Influence and Reputation are different
* Klout, PeerIndex and their peers do not measure reputation, they are trying to measure influence.
* Other players in the emerging reputation space include LinkedIn, Honestly.com and CubeDuel
* Service marketplaces such as Freelancer.com, oDesk and Elance have internal reputation measures
* There is immense value to reputation measures, across many aspects of business
* Reputation is becoming central to business and society

You can download the full Map of the Decade including descriptions of each ExaTrend by clicking on the image:

In the post I ran through the history of how I came to work for myself, and gave 7 reasons that matter to me for why I infinitely prefer to work for myself rather than someone else. Part of working for myself is building companies that go far beyond me, but the motivations of doing MY thing rather than being employed by someone else are the same.

The 7 reasons I love working for myself are worth restating:

1. My life is completely free-form and open-ended. I can – and do – regularly wake up in the morning and decide to change what my business does and how I do it. If you are in a job – even if it’s as CEO – there are constraints and job definitions to work within.

2. I can be myself. My early experience of employment was trying hard to fit in to very particular corporate cultures. I later realized that it was not that I wasn’t suited to corporate or adult society per se, but that there simply wasn’t a fit between my personality and the companies I happened to be working in.

3. I get the value I create. If I do things well, I get the rewards for that – be they financial or otherwise. A key part of the trade-off of being employed is that you will only get a small proportion of the value you create for the organization.

4. I am ultimately far more secure than employees. While it’s a risk to set up a business venture or work for yourself, ultimately there is far greater security than working for a company or even government. I can’t be laid off, and while my income may vary, I can always make money. In addition the (potentially) greater rewards from self-employment provide a solid buffer.

5. I control my life. I choose where I live rather than living where I happen to find the right job, I sleep in, go to the beach during the day, work harder sometimes and slack off at others – all at my will and not having to ask for permission.

6. I am the only one that needs to believe in me. What I do and where I get to is not dependent on someone else recognizing my capabilities. While I did pretty well in my ‘corporate’ career, I don’t think anyone I reported to ever saw what I was truly capable of (something I am sure many people will have experienced), so I would have been limited by others’ perceptions.

7. I work to create results, not to impress others. The majority of employed people of all levels of seniority play political games, striving to be seen or to be liked by the right people, working in environments where perceptions very often trump capability and outcomes.

If you are self-employed, what matters most to you, and if you’re not, what might compel you to leap out of employment?

One of the most important implications of organizations shifting to crowdsourcing and crowd work is the need for effective project management structures. We cover Project Management in Chapter 14 of Getting Results From Crowds.

The chapter opens with an excellent case study of how Nick McMenemy uses crowd platforms to drive his startup Virdium. I gained plenty of insights and new ideas in my interview of him, which I condensed into the case study, reproduced below. I’m sure you’ll find useful ideas in there.

Case study: How Nick McMenemy runs virtual teams

“Crowdsourcing means you can do a lot more for a lot less,” says McMenemy. Effective project management of crowd workers is enabling his new startup to get out of the gates faster.

The rise of our connected world has implications that reach into almost every aspect of our lives. I did many Valentine’s Day interviews back in 2003 and 2004, talking about proximity dating, one way in which technology is changing how we connect romantically.

This year we thought it would be worth putting out word to media about the fascinating topic of remote sex, as it is a topic in which their audience will very likely be interested. Here is our press release:

Remote sex – how distant lovers can still be intimate this Valentine’s Day

“Valentine’s Day 2012 will be the first one in which remote sex will play a significant role,” says leading futurist Ross Dawson.

“Living in a connected world doesn’t just mean keeping in touch with friends around the world and video calls to grandparents,” he says. “Now technology can be used to connect people in intimate way they probably never dreamed of.”

“On Valentine’s Day there will be many who will be separated from those they love. The new technologies of remote sex can bring them together over any distance.”

As an expert on how technology is transforming society, and publisher of the online magazine FutureofSex.net, Dawson believes that remote sex is a significant development in our future that needs to understand.

• Remote sex is associated with ‘teledildonics’, which is the field of controlling sex devices for both men and woman at a distance.

• ‘Remote sex’ is the use of communications technologies to have intimate encounters with others at a distance.

• This can be invaluable as more of us travel, often for extended periods, for example workers in mining, defence, hospitality, professional services, and many other industries.

• Others see it as a way to have exciting encounters without any complications.

• In the last year several remote sex products have been released into the market. These include Remote Pleasure, Mojowijo, which is used with the Nintendo Wii, and RealTouch, which recently distributed 1,000 devices to wives of US military personnel.

Further information on remote sex:
http://futureofsex.net/remote-sex/remote-pleasure-offers-the-full-teledildonics-experience/
http://futureofsex.net/remote-sex/realtouch-can-bring-the-teledildonics-conjugal-visit-toreality/
http://futureofsex.net/remote-sex/top-3-teledildonics-gadgets-in-existence/

About Ross Dawson
Ross Dawson is globally recognised as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. He is chairman of three companies, including leading international future think-tank Future Exploration Network.

His prescient books include Living Networks, which anticipated social networks and microblogging years before Facebook or Twitter were created. He has delivered keynotes on every continent except Antarctica, and his clients include world-leading companies such as Ernst & Young, IBM, Macquarie Bank, Microsoft, and Procter & Gamble.

As a highly influential – as well as entertaining – futurist and commentator, Dawson’s insights have been frequently featured in CNN, ABC TV, USA Today, New York Times, BusinessWeek, The Guardian, Today and Sunrise shows, and many other global media.

Interviews
To arrange an interview with Ross Dawson please contact…

The visual theme of the site has been derived from my personal logo, which depicts me merging with the machine.

The website, as before, includes a collection of speaker videos including my just-launched new keynote speaker video, detail of representative keynote speaking topics, an overview of my work as a strategy advisor, and details for event planners.

A new feature on the website is a collection of many of my visual frameworks, including the most popular ones such as the Newspaper Extinction Timeline, Social Media Strategy Framework, Web 2.0 Framework, Influence Landscape, and Future of Media Strategic Framework.

Each of the frameworks has comments enabled, so I will be hoping to build up some conversation and input into further editions of these frameworks on the site.

We have also recently launched a Ross Dawson content page on Facebook to build some engagement and conversation around the content. If you like it, would love a Like on Facebook for the page.

Not surprisingly US was top with 107 million users, with Brazil coming in second at 33 million and Japan next at just under 30 million.

I am always interested in comparing the degree of social media engagement across countries, so we did a simple analysis to find out the proportion of each country’s population that has a Twitter account, as below.

United Kingdom leads with 39% as many Twitter accounts as people in the country, U.S. somewhat behind at 36%, then followed by Netherlands, Chile, Venezuala, and Japan.

One of the problems with this data is that it only includes the top 20 countries by absolute numbers of Twitter users, so some smaller countries that have strong Twitter usage such as Singapore and Australia are not covered even if their per capita usage may have brought them into the top tier.

It is interesting to see Netherlands come in third, which is reflected in other Semiocast data that found Dutch twitterers to be the most active in the world.

The very high rankings of Chile, Venezuala, Argentina, and Colombia are striking, as they are not usually recognized as Twitter-intensive countries.

Countries such as India, Russia, and Germany feature on the list by virtue of their high populations, but are clearly well down in global rankings in Twitter uptake. India in particular may see more rapid uptake soon.

Our Trend Blend 2007+ map based on the London subway map spawned an entire genre of trend maps based on city train lines.

Here is Richard’s Trend Map for 2012, once again breaking new ground in communicating trends and ideas. Enjoy!

Click on the image for full-size pdf