Last week I was at the fifth eCampaigning Forum, an event for campaigners who use new media. I was able to blog from the new, funky One Laptop per Child.

But there was more pieces of the future around at the conference: the participants are making up how to use the web in new ways as part of their day-to-day. A word for the future that shone through the event was crowdsourcing - outsourcing a task to the virtual crowd.

Ben Bradzel, recently of the John Edwards Presidential campaign, told us how MoveOn.org had asked its readers to investigate an obscure candidate for Supreme Court. Three days later they had a 50 page dossier, which had gone through 3 levels of peer review - for free.

Action Medical Research asked for stories about premature babies. The results - videos on YouTube and pictures on Flickr - are pulled together into a campaign to Stand Up for Tiny Lives. On that website you can be moved by the testimonies and put pressure directly on your MP for action.

Then there is www.nabuur.com. Set up by the former head of WWF in the Netherlands, Nabuur (or 'neighbour') matches what a developing world village says it needs with what you have to offer. This is well beyond the traditional 'sponsor a child'. The site is a platform for the village to get what it need to progress on its own terms.

There were many more examples at the event. In the commercial world, you can crowdsource your innovation from FellowForce.

Crowdsourcing relies on the internet virtually removing the costs of searching and matching (what economist call 'transaction costs'). Right now, you can go to Ebay and find that one person in the world who wants that old piece of junk from the back of the attic.

One of the reasons why we accept the limitations of working in organisations is because its easier to find the resources you need when you need them (an insight that won Ronald Coase the Nobel Prize for Economics).

But in a knowledge economy, if we can can find the right people at the right time on the internet, why do we need organisations? Recent books like We Think and Here Comes Everybody (reviewed in the Guardian here) take this as their starting point.

But organisations do more than reduce transaction costs - they also attract customers through brands and can create unique capabilities. With this in mind, IBM has re-organised itself to take advantage of reducing transaction costs by sending work to the right place, any where in the world. They think this is third stage in the evolution of large companies: from national to multinational and now the Globally Integrated Enterprise.

Crowdsourcing is a result of how the internet is changing how we relate to each other, which will alter our lives and our work. Think about it next time you look at Wikipedia, or TV.com, or the Internet Movie Database, or the dozens of other sites where crowds are completing tasks for free.