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Crowdsourcing is one of those heady new words, a neologism coined from two other words, to describe global work-related phenomena unleashed by Internet connectivity.

Crowdsourcing is a new business model taking the concept of work, workers and business beyond the more familiar work force stretches of telecommuting, outsourcing and open-sourcing, to ever-expanding virtual realms with great opportunities and perils for business or careers.

In crowdsourcing, a job no longer equals the output of one person, nor the work of a group, nor even the company in some examples. Rather, the tasks normally assigned to one person, work group or company are opened up via the Internet to be completed or resolved by an undefined number of people who may either work for pay or who contribute as volunteers.

By contrast, a company outsources a job done traditionally inside the company to a worker outside of the company. If this outsourced job shift is outside of the country, the change is often called "off-shoring."

Open-sourcing is the nearest cousin to crowdsourcing, generally referring to crowdsourced work on software source code that is available for others to change, add to and build on, as with the Linux operating system.

Corporations, nonprofit social service organizations and many other groups are leveraging the ever-growing segment of the workforce populated by free-lancers and consultants beyond their organizational boundaries.

Assignment Zero is one such crowdsourcing experiment in journalism. The initiative was launched in March 2007 by Wired magazine with other collaborators as a crowdsourced method of reporting on crowdsourcing phenomena to track this emerging trend.

Wired's own reporter, Jeff Howe, in fact, is credited with coming up with crowdsourcing in a story he wrote last year about this Internet-enabled evolution. He distilled five common principles for the new crowdsourced labor pool.

The crowd "is dispersed" and must be able to complete work remotely. The crowd has "a short attention span," finding time in the margins of their lives. The crowd "is full of specialists," as varied as the crowdsourcing needs. The crowd "produces mostly crap," but makes it possible to find and leverage talent. And, the crowd "finds the best stuff," finding the best material and correcting mistakes.

A hyper-blog, in the way YouTube is a wildly successful crowdsourced hyper-vlog (video log), Assignment Zero invites professional and amateur journalists to report on a wide variety of crowdsourcing reporting assignments accessible via the effort's Web site (assignmentzero.com). Currently Assignment Zero's paid staff includes a number of editors and fact-checkers. Free-lance (emphasis on free) writers like myself join with others in the journalistic process, including researchers and interviewers, to explore the examples and people engaged in crowdsourcing everything from "crowdfunding" to "crowdpolitics" (MoveOn.org).

InnoCentive (innocentive.com) gives you the crowdsourced chance to crack significant research and development challenges posted to the site by companies like Procter & Gamble. You can earn real money for your efforts if you are successful in solving the research challenges. One of the current postings offers $1 million for the successful development of a biomarker for Lou Gehrig's disease. Interestingly, the idea for InnoCentive came from a public lecture at New Mexico's own Santa Fe Institute.

The nearest local example of crowdsourcing applied to the virtual and physical world is the Duke City Shootout. The shootout is a digital film festival held every summer in Albuquerque where the winning scripts, selected from a global competition by a virtually managed and judged process, are crafted into short films in frantic one-week collaborative crowdfilming exercises and shown at the festival gala.

Shootout organizers Grubb Graebner, Tony DellaFlora, Gene Grant and Reggie Russell, among others, were ahead of the times - to their credit and our community's benefit.

A new book, "Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything," gives you a great overview of these crowdsourcing trends. Crowdsourcing unleashes your creativity in ways impossible even a few years ago. In fact, this brave new world demands it.

Burge is president of the New Mexico IT & Software Association and principal at Proactive Teams.