The “Human Cloud” and the Future of Work

One of the things we have been writing about a lot at GigaOM — and particularly on our Web Worker Daily blog, which you can find under the “Collaboration” link above — is the future of work, in all of its various manifestations, and what it implies for our lives, both from a human standpoint as well as a technological one. It’s not just about tools like Skype and Jive Software and Yammer and Rypple, although it is partly about that (and some of them are very cool). It’s also about how working remotely changes our lives, for better and for worse, and how freelancing changes us, and how the entire nature of what we call work is evolving and blurring online.

Unlike our parents’ generation, the vast majority of people working now will have multiple jobs — in many cases, dozens of them — during their lifetimes. Many of those working now don’t even have what their parents would consider “real” jobs at all: they have contracts with a variety of different clients, or they outsource themselves and their skills through a third-party service like Elance or ODesk. The companies they work for and with may not even know what they look like, or where they live. This is the reality of what we like to call “the human cloud,” and it is changing us (and the companies we work for) in ways we may not even fully realize yet.

At GigaOM, we believe that this is such a fascinating and ultimately important topic that we aren’t just writing about it: we’re having a whole conference on the subject, called Net:Work. It’s coming in December — the 8th, to be exact — at the Mission Bay Conference Center at UCSF (and you can register here). We’ve got some great speakers lined up, including two giants in the field of technology and human behavior: John Hegel, of **, and John Seely Brown, the founding director of Xerox PARC, the research center that gave us things like the graphical UI for PCs and the mouse. We’ve also got ** from Cisco, which is involved in telepresence, and many others (the full list is here).

The idea of a “human cloud” is sort of shorthand for the disruption that the web and broadband has created, and is still creating, in the way we work — in the same sense that high-speed Internet access and other web technologies have disrupted the corporate IT market and led to what we call the “cloud.” In the IT sense, that means the web-enabled infrastructure that allows companies to store their data and even run their software from servers owned by Joyent or Amazon. When it comes to the human element, the “cloud” refers to freelancing and outsourcing and telecommuting and co-working, and all the other developments that are changing the way we work.

If you want to read more about these changes and their implications, and the tools and companies that are making them a reality, you can find some of our recent coverage here, as well as recent stories on co-working, the impact of collaboration on businesses and some great analysis from Web Worker Daily editor Simon Mackie in a recent GigaOM Pro report (subscription required) entitled “Opportunities Abound as the Rules of Work are Broken.” And please stay tuned to Web Worker Daily and to GigaOM in general, because we will be posting more updates about who is coming to the Net:Work conference and what they will be talking about.

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