[Show less]Amazons Mechanical Turk: Mission Forge acts as the middleman for providing your tasks to a group of people, just the same as Mechanical Turk. However, on Mechanical Turk, tasks are usually repetitive, and you can get paid for ticking them off (eg, making 1000 phone calls for a campaign, or searching images for something interesting). On Mission Forge, you can also have tasks that are highly unique. For example, if you want to manage the hosting of a public event, almost every task will be different. You can specify these tasks, and then find people to do them.
Microsoft Project: The Mission Forge feature set is rapidly growing to include all of Microsoft Projects most used feature sets. Microsoft Project files are also hard to share since few people own a license for the product (if youve ever tried, creating PDFs and taking screen shots are common ways people try to share MS Project data. Talk about painful!) and uploading project data online is rarely done due to the complexity of setting things up. Futhermore, MS Project files become very messy if multiple people start using them, and few people other than the project manager ever really look at the project data. Mission Forge is already online, and it is designed around giving your entire team access, giving them trust and responsibility. Mission Forge is project management for the 21st century!
Google Docs and Google Groups, and other online collaborative tools: Mission Forge doesnt provide word processing and spreadsheets, but it does provide a framework for managing the process of creating documents, and anything else for instance. There are user groups, messaging and group messaging facilities. You can set access to different projects and sets of tasks just like you can set access to documents on Google. IN fact, most of the powerful goodies behind the scenes at Google are present at Mission Forge too. If you are undertaking a project with any online collaborative tool, Mission Forge is the place to manage what your team is doing.
SETI @ home: SETI @ Home, and other screensaver number crunching applications makes use of your computers idle CPU cycles. Mission Forge allows you to make use of peoples free time. Imagine a girl who comes home from work and wants to do something interesting and productive for a few hours. She logs onto Mission Forge, finds a task in your project that she knows how to do, and she does it immediately. Now imagine that you had 100 such interesting tasks in your project, and 99 other people came home and did the same thing. Your project would be done overnight. How interesting, or important, is your Mission?
Social networking sites: Imagine if you could send your friends a list of tasks that would change the world, instead of say, a graphic of baby dinosaur that hatched out of a jpeg egg? Now that would be something. To help you make the transition we have created a Facebook app to allows you to do exactly that. Maybe soon your Mission Forge will become your most powerful friend network.
Other online project management: We get the web, and we have turned traditional project management on its head. Managing projects the old way usually meant having a central Project Czar who ministered of the task repository like some demented Howard Hughes character watching the scurrying of his minions below. On Mission Forge there is no need for a central project manager (but you can have one if you want) as everyone can have access to the project and take responsibility for their bit. Did Frank just finish his work? He doesnt need to waste your time telling you, as he can log onto Mission Forge and update his status himself. Does Judy need help with her group of tasks? She can broadcast them on the Mission Forge network and bring in people to help. Mission Forge is the most flexible, most powerful project management tool on the web, which is close to saying it may be the most powerful PM tool ever.
