I have this strong belief that soon, 10-20 years, a decent chunk of jobs in the world will become available though the kinds of services market place like the SourceForge.Net Marketplace launched by SourceForge. According to ReadWriteWeb, this marketplace has been in closed beta for about a year. While the idea is certainly not necessarily novel, the ubiquity of the internet, cheap development and hardware resources, etc, make such services a lot easier to sell and acquire today.
In the scientific world, Innocentive and other efforts fall into this category, although the models are a little different. Already you are seeing Open Science projects being hosted on Google Code. As open source projects, related services, etc become more common, it will be interesting to note what kind of marketplaces arise and how they are leveraged. I can see a microeconomy developing around such “expert” offerings, with models ranging from services rendered, to micropayments for milestones, to auctions. The sad part is, anytime money gets involved, someone, somewhere will try and figure out how to game the system.
Further reading
Open source science as an innovation model
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[...] The other day I blogged about the SourceForge Marketplace and a microeconomy developing around expert offerings. Chris takes the thought one step further. Is the future of web-based “startups” not a formal legal long running entity, but high value projects where you get together with a set of people, perhaps via a network of some sort (the “sustainable” is key in the above tweet)? [...]