People say, “If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.” – I was definitely in the right room when I attended CrowdSourcing Week Global Conference 2014 in Singapore, 7 – 10 April 2014. The event was packed with brilliant speakers and visionary audiences. That way, I found myself learning new things about crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, co-creation and open innovation the whole time I was at the conference.

I’m one of CrowdSourcing Week 2014 advisors from Indonesia and Epi Ludvik Nekaj, founder & CEO of CrowdSourcing Week, was speaking about CrowdSourcing at StartupLokal meetup last February in Jakarta. The concept of CrowdSourcing has been a part of Indonesian culture. Without labeling it as a ‘crowdsourcing’ we already use the power of crowd to solve problems in our country, like finding blood donor, giving out free classes to educate the community, natural disaster relief, and many other. From the meetup I’ve learned that crowdsourcing is social media turns into social productivity.

Every day in CrowdSourcing Week Global Conference 2014, we got inspired by 15+ speakers, sharing best practices in crowdsourcing projects and showcasing what they have done in their company. Some that got me thinking are talks by Sean Moffit of WikiBrands, Jeremiah Owyang of Crowd Companies, Jennifer Gustetic of NASA, Jay Rogers of Local Motors, Maria Ressa CEO of Rappler, Bryan Kramer the writer of ‘There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human: #H2H’, Arun Mehra of TalentHouse India, Paul Niederer, Joel Cere, Sangeet Choudary, Pedro Oliveira, and of course Mark Philpott of Humenaeity with his inspiring personal story on leaving everything behind, being a homeless, and crowdsourcing his life.

Mandy, the CEO of Wujudkan.com, Indonesia’s crowdfunding platform, asked me what was I doing in Crowdsourcing event. A good question because on the surface, my company NulisBuku.com is an online self-publishing print on demand company, but we truly are driven by the crowd.

We do crowdsourcing because we love the crowd disruption possibilities. Something that we never think of will come out of crowd. Crowd connects people with purpose, crowd want to belong to something, it creates a strong bond in the community. It also validates new ideas that you have.

Jeremiah Owyang gave us a lot of examples on how to apply crowdsourcing concept in various companies. He event came up with a formula to crowd enable your company.

Jay Rogers wowed the audience with his Local Motors where people can crowdsource a car :O

Jennifer from NASA Explaining how NASA use the power of crowd at Top Coder to solve problems faster and cheaper too

There are a lot of buzz around airBnB, one of most successful crowdsourcing platforms, and also talks about bitcoin. At this point, I installed BitCoin app on my android out of curiosity. Antonny said it’s banned in Indonesia though.

Nick, CEO of Rocki, presented to us on how to successfully raise a million dollar for your crowdfunding campaign. It’s inspire me start my own campaign for people to fund me to stay in Istanbul for a month and write a novel 😀

Aside from insightful knowledge, CrowdSourcing Week 2014 brought me to a new global friendship from Saudi Arabia, Singapore, Kenya, Japan and many other countries. I valued our friendship that has been giving me a lot of new perspective about business and life in general.

Bravo CrowdSourcing Week team: Epi, Ben, Priti, Briana, Hane and volunteers. Wish you luck for CrowdSourcing Week Summit Brussels and hope to see you next year at CrowdSourcing Week Global Conference 2015!