Finnur Palmi Magnusson aka Gommit

I’ve been tossing questions into my social graph for a while. Asking my friends, family and followers for guidance on things that would take me ages to work out myself. Most of the time it results in great twists and marvelous solutions to tedious tasks on my ToDo list.

I hate cars. Stupid piece of scrap metal that starts breaking down the moment you fork out half your life savings to buy one. This post is however not a rant on the stagnated automobile industry but rather the glorious extent of my social network.

It seems like since the financial meltdown in Iceland, people have stopped abandoning their cars when they run out of gas and buy new ones. Mechanics will have to keep our cars running for the foreseeable future and seem to be struggling to keep up. Me thinking that I could just pop into some garage and have the family car fixed before the holidays, but no. Two week waiting time at the 3 shops that I could think off before my first cup of coffee this morning.

Time for some crowdsourcing.

As this was a very local problem, I decided to take it to my facebook crowd in Icelandic.

My first post was more of a rant really. But ended up in a conversation between the CEO and CTO of CCP, MD of Loftleiðir Icelandic and the equivalent  of Kevin Rose in Iceland (Helginn.net) ranting about the state of Iceland and the industry.

My second attempt was a shotgun tactic with updates both to facebook and twitter.

This time around my facebook family decided to point out the fact that half of my cousins are mechanics. Problem is that they tend to be just as busy, if not more when I call them. I used up most of my favors when trying to keep my cars running during the university years. Arney cleverly pointed out that Gulla is going mental over the state of our car.

Gyða saved the facebook crowd by posting her cousins garage facebook page with the comment that he was probably too busy but worth the try. But she is a super smart computer scientist, so she doesn’t count in this experiment.

So much for facebook, but my trusted network of Twitter friends had me sorted in no time. Three solid recommendations with URLs and personal contacts later, my car is going in tomorrow morning.

There is a lesson in there somewhere.

In all, I got about 15 responses to my cry for mechanic help. Most of the facebook stuff was rubbish. Twitter rocked, even got calls from people trying to help. All the good recommendations came from happy customers with URLs to their trusty companies.

…. so companies: Treat your clients well, have a solid presence online and be active on the social interwebs.

…. people: crowdsource the questions to life, universe and everything.

…. and check out Bíla Áttan, they squeezed me in and I’ll report on how it goes…. on Twitter.

If none of this makes sense, I apologize. My company Agora.is researching this heavily at the moment and I can’t think or blog about anything else.