Computing Questions? A Web Service Lets You Say What You'd Pay for Answers

By KELLY McCOLLUM

No matter how many reference manuals, instruction booklets, and FAQ's you have, the quickest answer for a technical question often comes from a shout to the geek next door.

That's the idea behind QuestionExchange, a Web-based matchmaking service that is a sort of eBay for computer gurus, where people with technical questions indicate how much they're willing to pay for answers. Its creators say the service may help colleges and universities caught short on technology-support staff.

A techie having trouble configuring a mail server or debugging a program, for example, can post the problem on the Web site, where other experts can lend a hand. Along with each problem, the user says how much he or she is willing to pay for an answer. The user may also leave the price open and let respondents bid on the job. QuestionExchange then handles the payment and takes a 5-per-cent fee.

"One way to look at it is as a massively parallel machine answering technical-support questions," says Hector Gonzalez, the company's founder and chief executive. "Millions of experts from around the world looking at your problems in parallel may make any problem trivial."

The Web site is open to anyone who is willing to pay for answers. And anyone can serve as an expert, by submitting to a continuing certification process. QuestionExchange would be particularly useful for colleges and universities, says Stephen Bayle, president of the company, which plans to offer versions of the service tailored to specific campuses.

Because the typical university is home to a wide variety of technological activities -- specialized software crunching numbers in administrative systems, Web servers offering course pages in every department, student machines running every known operating system -- it's unlikely that an institution's support staff will have a ready answer to every possible question.

"There are so many technologies, and idiosyncrasies about the integration of those technologies, that only through experience are you going to be able to get the solutions to those problems," says Richard E. Mickool, chief information officer at Babson College.

A service like QuestionExchange provides a way for an institution to widen its knowledge base and better handle all those idiosyncrasies, he says. "You've really just extended my staff, which is what I need to do."

Technology administrators like Mr. Mickool have found it increasingly hard to hire and keep technical-staff members, who can often make more money in the corporate world. "For institutions that have real problems maintaining a strong technical-support group, this kind of service could be very useful," says Kenneth M. King, a former president of the educational-technology group EDUCOM who has consulted for QuestionExchange.

"At a lot of institutions, there are two or three staff positions unfilled, because they've been unable to attract the right kind of talent to fill them," he says. "They might use some of those funds to use this service."

The company itself goes further, pitching its service as a tool to aid institutions in running their help desks.

The plan, says Mr. Bayle, is to create a walled-off area of the QuestionExchange site for users at a particular college or university. Within that area, technical-staff members, system administrators, and users could ask and answer questions about their own campus's technology at no charge. Answered questions would be put into a data base where other users could refer to them later.

If a question stumped the on-campus techies, it would get pushed out into the public exchange, where other experts could bid on it -- with the institution paying the fee.

Universities could specify that answers to questions they sent to the service end up in a free data base, which would then be used by other institutions having similar technology problems, Mr. Bayle adds. That makes sense, he says, because academe is "a collaborative, non-competitive market."

The company's plan would seem to fit in well with the existing culture of campus technology, says Mr. King, the consultant. "Colleges and universities have a strong informal network, he says. "People meet at conferences and get to know each other, and when there's a problem, they call or exchange e-mail."