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Crowdsourcing Jobs to a Worldwide Mobile Workforce

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37 pointscwan9 comments

Given that there doesn't seem to be any question of poor Africans doing useful work for Western multinationals, and this is basically structured as an aid giveaway... could it be an effective aid giveaway? One big problem with aid is that donor money gets siphoned off by corrupt governments and, ahem, aid organizations. If crediting someone with call time is as good as cash, which I have heard is increasingly the case in countries which have never had a stable currency, maybe we can just cut out the middlemen and deal with the intended beneficiaries directly. (That is a big "maybe", given that poor people's problems are a wee bit more extensive than "I have no money.")

i see a flaw in this model though. if i'm a western company not doing business in kenya, what do i really want low-skill laborers to do? I don't want them filling out surveys as they are unlikely to be my target audience. I think things like recognizing an object might work, but then you would need graphics capable phones... maybe i'm missing something here.

I had described nearly this exact idea to my wife while walking around downtown Seattle. The only difference was I was trying to figure out a way to give the phones away for free also.

It would be fantastic if doing tasks on a phone was a better use of time than begging on a street. I hope this works out.

I tend to think that anyone sufficiently intelligent, motivated and sane to be performing tasks for money is unlikely to be found begging on the streets of Seattle. To be truly, homelessly poor in America you pretty much have to have something seriously wrong with you -- whatever it is, it's likely to make you a pretty damn unreliable worker.

But hey, I'm sure they'd be willing to take the free phones.

You'd be surprised: I sure was.

I got into a long conversation with a homeless guy outside 4th Avenue records (I think that's what it's called? been a while) in Manhattan a long time ago. It turns out that he was laid off from a programming job in a financial firm (this took place in the mid 90's) and he claimed to make over $900/day panhandling. Of course I didn't believe the programming thing, but he answered all my technical questions well enough that either he was one really well read homeless person, or he was telling the truth! However, based on what I saw, I could believe he was making hundreds of $$ per day.

Then again, maybe he was laid off because he just couldn't hold down a job, I dunno!

We can be pretty sure he's the exception rather than the rule; check out the statistics (I can dig them up if you wish), but as I remember the vast plurality if not the majority of the homeless are the mentally ill who would have been in institutions prior to the misguided deinstitutionalization effort that didn't provide them with alternatives that worked.

Once you separate out the "if a Republican is present there are homeless, if a Democrat they disappear" propaganda, there's quite a bit of serious research on this subject. I certainly know that the vast majority of homeless I encountered on the streets of the Cambridge, MA area in the early to mid-80s were clearly mentally ill, sometimes severely so (e.g. frank schizophrenia).

It's essentially mturk using text messaging.

I've thought about building a kiosk for homeless people to spit out pennies and nickles...

I'm reminded of Japanese intelligence gathering methods in the days leading up to Pearl Harbor. This would be a hell of an intelligence gathering tool, the best part of it is that you could gather data in such a fractioned and distributed way that individual people wouldn't be able to guess what it is they're doing.

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