In 2006, Wired coined the word "crowdsourcing".  The idea behind crowdsourcing is to use many people to make light work of a task. Grass roots political efforts are a form of crowdsourcing.  Software development activities in the opensource community are forms of crowdsourcing like the development of Drupal and Joomla!

Lots of organizations and companies use forums to provide support (both from the company and from lay people in the community) like Roku Labs for products or Revver for services.  Other groups have created ad-hoc communities to support products like on the AVS Forum.  The citizen journalist site NowPublic and the grass roots political site MoveOn.

In comes GetSatisfaction.

Get Satisfaction is a community that helps people to get the most from the products they use, and where companies are encouraged to get real with their customers.

The site provides a venue for organizations or users to create a support forum.  A forum can be started by anybody.  If a customer/user starts a forum, GetSatisfaction will encourage staff persons to participate.  When someone starts a thread, others can sign on and indicate that they have had the same problem.  The mood of the thread is monitored by smilies.  As people add a smiley, the average mood is displayed.  Staff persons of the company are clearly marked on the person's avatar.

Some companies, like Ping.fm are using GetSatisfaction as the primary mode of online support.  I could see that nonprofits could adopt use of this service to manage support on grants, classes, events, or online services easily and quickly.  Likewise larger companies could use the service to gauge the mood of community.

So, can support be crowdsourced?  Yep, I think so.