Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen is an excellent book that talks about how humanity is restructuring interaction to change how science is done.  The Internet and sophisticated support software are helping scientists and engineers work more efficiently, by reducing the difficulty in matching experts to those who most need their talents.  While Nielsen is speaking specifically about scientific discovery, many of his ideas are important to why Workherder can make having software built substantially more efficient.  According to Nielsen, “the attention of the right expert at the right time is often the single most valuable resource one can have in creative problem solving.”  In Workherder, developers post packages of software services they are willing to perform called work bundles.  Because Workherder encourages developers to post work bundles for which they have extensive expertise, those trying to build new applications (herders) can always get the right expertise at the right time.

Nielsen goes on to describe the work done by a future scientist, which sounds a lot like the day of a typical developer on Workherder.  “Each morning you begin your work by sitting down at your computer, which presents to you a list of ten requests for your assistance, a list that’s been distilled especially for you from millions of such requests…Out of all those requests, these are the problems where you are likely to have maximal comparative advantage.”

In the end, Nielsen says, everybody wins because of comparative advantage.  Comparative advantage is an old idea in economics stating that certain actions cost less for one party to do than another.  For example, somebody who has already implemented a site search solution in Ruby on Rails, would take far less time than somebody who is doing it for the first time.  When we perform a task over and over again, we keep tweaking our comparative advantage, working out the kinks and bringing down the cost of doing it next time.  By maximizing everybody’s comparative advantage, Workherder makes life better for both developers and herders.