Why this year Crowdsourcing is the topic of our Future Summit Series in San Francisco and Sydney

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I’ve been remiss in not yet mentioning Future of Crowdsourcing Summit on my blog, so here is a bit of background to the event. Full details are on the Summit website with an overview in the flyer below.

Future of Crowdsourcing Summit 2010

In 2006 we organized Future of Media Summit, which was a world first for an event held across continents linked by video. The awesome speakers at our kickoff event including Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired, who had just launched his book The Long Tail, and John Hagel, author most recently of The Power of Pull.

After running highly successful Future of Media Summits with the same cross-continental format in 2007 and 2008, in 2009, with our events activities now taken over by The Insight Exchange, we decided to move on to the topic of Future of Influence, as “influence is the future of media“.

This year we wanted to continue with our cross-continental events, and were playing with a number of possible concepts around the future of media and beyond. In the end we chose to go with the Future of Crowdsourcing, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, we see that crowdsourcing is becoming central to the future of almost everything, and it merits being pushed to prominence in terms of its potential impact across business, government and society. (More on this soon.)

Secondly, crowdsourcing is a very significant element shaping the future of media, so that is one of the key topics we will explore at the event.

Thirdly, crowdsourcing is at the center of how our group of companies operate. We have for many years actively used crowds in our work, and we are continuing to experiment in how we can best tap their potential in our current scope of work and beyond.

Fourthly, we have come to the point where this series of events, now in its fifth year, is clearly no longer just about the future of media and related spaces. Rather than being tied to a topic and trying to make it work each year, we can now consider ourselves liberated each year to choose as the most interesting and relevant topic around which we could bring together some great thinkers.

As such we can now cast these annual events as our “Future Summit Series”, which each year will take on the topic of the moment.

This year, there is no doubt that the richest and juiciest theme we could engage with is where crowdsourcing is going and its impact.

I hope to see you there!