Brazil software crowdsourcing: a first step in a multi-year study

Crowdsourcing means outsourcing to a large network of people—a crowd. This form of managing work allocation has become much more sophisticated in recent years due to improvements in technology and changes in the work ecosystem. Crowdsourcing portends-- not only the disruption of outsourcing-- but the disruption of the entire global labor market. Small, atomized, tasks that can be completed and paid for in small increments are unprecedented in the history of work. Software has been the pioneer in all the large mega-trends of the last generation: in computer technology, technological entrepreneurship, offshore outsourcing, and now-- in crowdsourcing. This paper describes the starting point of a research project that aims to investigate the Brazilian software labor and industry markets. These markets are being transformed and disrupted as a result of the new phenomena of crowdsourcing. To be more specific, we aim to understand how the three elements of crowdsourcing are emerging in Brazil – the buyers, the platforms, and the crowd. The goal of our project is to identify the challenges faced by Brazilian software developers engaged in crowdsourcing platforms as well as their best practices in order to provide recommendations to the government and support for new developers interested in joining this market.