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World's First Crowdsourced Whitepaper From The Insight Community

from the understanding-digital-nomads dept

Tue, Nov 4th 2008 1:25pm — Mike Masnick

Back in August we announced that, via the Insight Community, Dell was sponsoring a series of cases to create a crowdsourced whitepaper about the challenges, from a business and IT perspective, concerning the rise of so-called digital nomads. If you've been a member of the Insight Community, you've no doubt seen the cases. The best results from those cases have been running on a special blog on DigitalNomads.com, creating some really fascinating content. If you haven't been reading it, here's just a small sampling of some of the great posts we've seen:

These are just a few of the examples of the content generated within the Insight Community and then used on the Digital Nomads blog. However, beyond just creating that content, the idea was to take it even further. This content has created a great compendium of knowledge -- building blocks -- for how to get the best out of being, managing or maintaining digital nomads. So, from that core content, we've begun crafting the world's first crowdsourced white paper.

We've been taking much of the early content, and have started to craft articles around it, and then place them in a wiki, to allow anyone to continue contributing and editing the product. The first of those articles, on What It Means To Be A Digital Nomad is now available, so please jump in and add your thoughts. We're also still running more cases on the topic to generate more content, and will be publishing more wiki articles for the whitepaper over the coming weeks. Once we feel the articles are somewhat stable, we'll try to put together a more finished version that can be downloaded as well. Thanks to everyone for participating and we look forward to doing similar projects in the future. If you're interested in sponsoring a similar endeavor, feel free to find out more and sign up to sponsor a case.

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Filed Under: digital nomads, insight community, whitepaper
Companies: dell, floor64

4 Comments

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Hoeppner, 4 Nov 2008 @ 3:07pm

Links don't open in a new window/tab.
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Hoeppner, 4 Nov 2008 @ 3:09pm

After looking at some of the stuff it's unnoticable that they're from 'fans'
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Anonymous Coward, 4 Nov 2008 @ 3:29pm

I would love to be a digital nomad, but the company I work for is still operates in a militaristic style. They are a prime example of why unions still exist.
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gene_cavanaugh, 16 Nov 2008 @ 3:14pm

Digital Nomads
I get the impression that the articles that are favored are ones that read well (that is, that appear to be authored by journalists) but don't actually relate to the real world.
Telecommuting (digital nomads) do NOT reduce costs for most companies - and, while they do reduce costs for workers, in the long run they tend not to be cost-effective for them, either.
The problem, quite simply, is that most people, when they are not constantly supervised, eventually become unproductive. Why should they be productive? It appears no one will notice! From the employer side, "out of sight, out of mind". We can be very conscious of what the workers we deal with on a daily basis are doing, but what about the ones we can't see?
Of course, for journalists, none of this matters - journalism, unlike the real world, is based largely on individual creativity - but what about the rest of the world, where interactivity is required?
So telecommuting CAN work; if you have a worker who is willing to accept being invisible, and will work to erase that barrier; and if you have an employer who is willing to take the extra effort to stay connected; but not otherwise.
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