I was mulling over theGoogle Answers service and thinking of other models along the same line and came up with an idea. In case you’re not familiar with it, you can use Google Answers to find answers to questions. Any questions. Want to know what Babe Ruth batted in his rookie year, and you can’t find the answer? You can ask Google Answers, offer a sum of money for the answer, and if one of Google’s experts knows the answer or how to find it and thinks your fee is sufficient, they will find the answer, tell you, then take your money. It’s brilliant. It remains to be seen whether it is sustainable or not, but in theory it’s an excellent concept. We’ll call it….

….distributed expertise, lacking a better term. So now, a challenge I face on a daily basis. Increasingly, web sites are built using CSS, Cascading Stylesheets. They’re excellent, but the browser vendor’s support of them is wildly inconsistent, and it can be very difficult to get to the bottom of all the inconsistencies and produce a stylesheet that works properly across all browser. As a result, I spend a lot of time digging around for answers to little glitches, searching usenet, mailing list archives, a series of about 6-7 books I have that cover the topic, the W3C site linked above, and so on. I’m not alone in these tribulations. I know this from the mailing lists I’m on. The primary CSS list I subscribe to averages about 150 messages a day. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t keep up with it.

So imagine that a consortium of, say, 20 colleges got together and ponied up $2.5k each, and we used this sum to hire a person. The CSS person. The oracle at Delphi . The person who, every time one of the 20 members of the consortium needed help with CSS, they would email/get in touch with the CSS person. ‘Yo, dude, whats up with this page, see how the text is bleeding over into the margins in Netscape 6? I need that fixed, why doesn’t it work’? Right now I struggle with issues like that almost every day, sometimes it takes me more than a day to find the answer, which is relatively expensive (more expensive than $2.5k a year) for my employer to support.

There would be all kinds of implementation challenges (Dave, you’re hogging the CSS dude! Hey, the CSS dude is slacking, he never answers questions, I think he is playing UT2003 all day!) But not insurmountable challenges, it seems to me. I know there are existing contract labor sites similar to Google Answers where I could go put jobs like this out to bid ($25 to solve my css problem) but I am suggesting a more formal relationship, where someone is on full-time retainer to handle a particular area of expertise. It seems in the modern age where tellecomuting is increasingly accepted that this would be a great solution for folks like my employer who need assistance in a particular area of expertise, but not a sufficient amount of expertise to actually pay a full-time employeee for it.

Anyone run into such a thing? Any thoughts on the notion?