When companies are trying to make the Latest Thing, there are lots of rules about keeping things on the hush hush. Nokia House, the headquarters just outside downtown Helsinki, is ripe with security. Every door in the ginormous complex can only be opened with a personal electronic gadget, and the design floor is even off-limits to employees from other floors.

This makes for running into lots of glass doors and psychologically feeling like you’re doing some top secret stuff. But it’s not all secretive and a lot of projects benefit from the spirit of open-source collaboration. Field work and user studies are common here, but they’re still short-term and limited in locations and number of people involved. How can we work way beyond these glass doors?

1 in 4 workers has been with their employer for less than a year. 1 in 2 has been there for less than 5 years (from this video of fun facts). What does it mean to “work for a company”? What if people worked a little bit for a lot of companies (or there were no companies at all)? This could be a potential source of income for lots of consumers-turned-proactive collaborators, including residents in Johannesburg townships who almost all use Nokia phones, are looking for economic opportunities, and whose continuous feedback would greatly improve the tools Nokia is trying to make. There are emerging efforts like  Redesignme.com and Txteagle to co-create with companies (which could, at the very least, prevent juice packaging backlashes), and there are more peer-to-peer tools like Shorttask and Otetsudai that allow individuals to work for and with each other on a short term scale. We still need to develop the methods to compensate lots of people in lots of places for longer periods of time. In the spirit of crowdsourcing and microfunding, how can we facilitate crowdemployment and microsalaries? – with the hopes that all of your microsalaries add up to something macro…

design, Helsinki