Crowdsourcing your next project

"When Constellation Energy Group Inc's commodities group needed a new system recently, it considered the usual sources of labor: internal staff, a consultant, a contractor, offshore programmers or a mix of all four. Instead, it turned to a somewhat less traditional technique: Ask programmers from all over the world to compete with each other to write the best code for the system. When all is said and done, hundreds of programmers will labor over a system that, in the end, will represent the work of less than 100 developers, whose code will be hand-selected by Constellation and TopCoder Inc., the company that is managing the competition."

Computerworld