The Human Cloud: An Increasingly Prominent Trend

(Originally posted on my Tech Wisdom blog last year)

The Human Cloud. The phrase conjures up many images—skydivers interlocking hands to form a net as they free fall, a cluster of women in an overly crowded bathroom coating the air with a fine film of hairspray, or the technological wonder of Cloud City as it drifts above a gassy planet in The Empire Strikes Back. While all of those things could pass as a human cloud in some way, the true definition tends to be a little more complicated and much more based in reality than any scene from a movie. Indeed, the very concept of the Human Cloud would have once been considered pure science fiction, a type of technology that might occur in some far off future. But the future has arrived, bringing a virtual technology workforce that is fast becoming a booming industry.

What is a Human Cloud?

So what exactly is this Human Cloud thingy everyone has been talking about? It’s a virtual world where people are hired via the internet to do all kinds of tasks. These tasks include everything from freelancing for a magazine to technology management for people based in the IT world. With our economy the way it has been the past few years and jobs being cut, employers are forced to find ways to curb their in-house staff but still have productivity. Gone are the days of the regular 9-5 job. As a technology workforce, people can work their own hours and do it from any number of locations. Social media like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkIn make it possible to communicate and check email from almost anywhere! Remember the common place sight of office chatter around the water cooler? Picture that water cooler as a portable laptop and your office space a coffee shop or an airplane. Now you’re getting the idea of what a human cloud is really all about.

Where do employers find their virtual workforce if they aren’t hired in the traditional way? Elance and websites similar to it act as a virtual middleman, bringing the employer and employee together in a human cloud scattered across the globe. On Elance, an employer lists what kind of project they have available. The potential worker can view it and decided whether or not it’s a good fit for their skills.  That means that in addition to hiring one individual for a project, it’s also possible to outsource projects to a team of people located as far away as Bangalore or Shanghai. Due to the long reach of the human cloud, you may never meet this technology workforce team face to face but you can still expect and receive effective results.

Yash Talreja