If you haven't heard the term "Crowdsourcing," brace yourself. It's one of those shiny new vocab words that, as soon as you learn it, you find leaping off of everyone's tongues.

According to Wikipedia, Crowdsourcing is:

The act of taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing them to a group of people or community, through an "open call" to a large group of people (a crowd) asking for contributions.

If this 37-word explanation peaks your curiosity, rest assured there are millions more written on the subject. Hot titles include Crowdsourcing, Open Innovation, The Wisdom of Crowds, and Here Comes Everybody.

As I was reading Crowdsourcing, I came across an outstanding example of the theory via a fortuitous Twitter posting: Macaroni Kid.

Facebook answers the question "What's on your mind?" Foursquare answers "Where are you?" And Macaroni Kid answers the all-important question facing every mom: "What's there for my kid to do around here?"

By enabling local moms to share the family-friendly happenings in their communities with others, Macaroni Kid "crowdsources" to Publisher Moms. Within eight months of launching (in April 2008), Macaroni Kid had 60 different communities. Today, they average a new community a day and recently launched in Hawaii (hey, those kids can't go to the beach every day, you know).

Publisher Moms run their own "franchise" of Macaroni Kid online in their communities, gathering local content and building a subscriber base. There's also a closed forum (Facebook-style) for the Publisher Mom community, where moms share ideas.

"It's like Avon meets the Internet with an ad revenue share model," explains Joyce Shulman, the company's founder (and a lawyer which I imagine comes in handy when building a media empire, zip code by zip code).

This phenomenon beautifully dovetails with earlier posts I've written about the underutilized talent of moms who've left the corporate world to raise kids. The Publisher Moms are grateful to have a forum for their talent and energy, plus they're doing something that benefits their own families. Not to mention that they've saved thousands of kids from the worst fate on earth: being bored.

Labels: crowdsourcing, Working Mothers

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