In the next issue of Bright Magazine you’ll find an interview I had with Matthijs van der Pol of Bright.

I did a video interview with the Dutch website NuZakelijk, last wednesday. You can watch it here: http://www.nuzakelijk.nl/20080815/nuzakelijk-video/iedereen-productontwerper-bij-redesignme Dutch only.

Join the RedesignMe hyves and share the co-creation message with your friends!

RedesignMe will join this year’s PIMRC conference in Cannes, France on 16 September 2008. Stephen Wolak of Vodafone Group asked me to be part of a panel during the conference.The panel will discuss the subject: “Collaborative Innovation: Good for Business?”.

Abstract: “Open Innovation and Collaborative Innovation have attracted a lot of coverage in recent years, particularly with the publication of Don Tapscott’s book “Wikinomics”. What does collaborative innovation mean for large corporations? Is collaborative innovation good for traditional businesses? How can corporations collaborate and differentiate? Come along to the panel and hear leading experts in this field discuss these issues.” 

More info here. 

Unfortunately our website was not reachable today for a couple of hours. This was due to problems at our access provider Claranet.nl. A heavy duty cable was damaged by workers and this left the entire High Tech Campus without an internet connection for 4 hours. This was a good moment for us to start thinking about a distributed server system. Btw. We laughed our asses off when we saw the advertisement of Claranet on their website. Zero-downtime eh?

As our online community is starting to grow we needed a better overview of who’s who. That’s why we updated the Redesigners section. As you can see we also introduced a level system. People who earn RDMs rise in level. Last but not least we added a “My website” field and a “About Me” field to your profile page. So now you can tell other Redesigners a little bit about yourself!

Once in a while we track back to blogs that write about crowdsourcing, co-creation or RedesignMe in general. It’s good to see that more and more people (and companies!) are learning the benefits of crowd-sourcing and it’s good to realise we are at the beginning of this new era. 

Blogger Ashlee Simmons writes today: “I ran across something else today that ties in with crowdsourcing. I heard about a new company called RedesignMe, which pays users to critique, design and help to build communications tools. I’ve heard of sites that pay you to comment, post, write and brainstorm, but this is very new and exciting.Who wouldn’t love to be paid for helping out? Crowdsourcing is great, I think. I am very pro-let the crowd help out. That said, I don’t like the downside of crowdsourcing, which usually means low pay. I can see the benefit for companies, but it’s not fair to workers.”

I partially agree with Ashlee on the downside of Crowdsourcing. We shouldn’t overlook the long term effects of the efforts of the crowds, which really do pay back but not by means of money but by means of less frustrating products and also the feeling of actually having participated in the creation of something big.