Friendsourcing
In a recent bout of interest in ‘personal information management,’ I’ve been thinking about and talking to people about the way we stay organized and on top of things. Some people like GTD, others use google gcal/gmail/etc, others use post-its, and a whole host of people don’t record this information at all. Instead, they do what I am calling friendsourcing. (Until a better name comes along, at least.)
We’re familiar with outsourcing – sending our tasks or whatever to totally outside people. We’re familiar, too, with crowdsourcing – asking the lazyweb/lazytwitter/lazytumblr/lazy___ world to answer questions for ourselves. In either case, these methods are generally going to people who we trust marginally, perhaps only because that’s their job (outsourcing) or because we hope that correct answers will bubble to the top (crowdsourcing).
I’m finding an increasing number of people who do this friendsourcing thing – that is, they delegate this organization and other data to remember to trusted friends. One unnamed advisor, for instance, freely admits that he doesn’t record things or rely on himself to remember information – he tells his grad students, and among those (presumably) trusted people, someone will remember and remind him. A friend of mine has also said that he doesn’t write down activities and relies on reminders, especially from people (in this case, me) who he has determined generally do know what’s going on.
I think the thing that makes this really different is (1) that these are generally scheduling or organizational items and (2) that these people have found that relying on others is more effective, for them, than trying to remember information on their own. It would be interesting to explore these ideas further. For now, though, this is just a semi-structured thought I had a little over two months ago here (note: this is my personal – entirely not professional – blog).
Katrina, I appreciate your comment and insight. I like the way you’ve identified differentiating attributes of each “sourcing” arrangement. What is interesting to consider is that the differentiation seems to revolve around levels of trust. How do you think the “sourcing” scheme (and trust levels) is related to the importance of the information? I would think that the less important the information, the more likely one would be to “source” the management of it to a lower level of trust. It seems like you could have a graph showing the degree of importance of personal information along the x axis and the required trust level on the y axis. There are some people who throw around personally identifiable information without much thought and others who keep it very close hold. In the grand scheme of personal information management, if there could be a single system for a person like your friend, it would have to incorporate multi-level security. This grand system would also have a wireless syncing capability and be interoperable with the major personal information management systems. It would have a personal ad-hoc network (PAN) management capability. He would set up profiles for types of devices and types of authentication required on his PAN.
This is actually the first time I heard the words “friendsourcing” and “crowdsourcing”. Quite catchy ^_^. Anyhow, I think friendsourcing may just be the next big thing. After all, “trust” is an important factor in just about any transaction. And who else to trust better than your tried and tested friends right?
I think friendsourcing is quite useful, although you have to be careful which friends you outsource the information to. I have some that are better than others at reminding me of the information I need to know. The trick is to pass information to them that they will WANT to remember…and learning which friends are good for what.