Aardvark Daily

Please visit the sponsor!

Crowd-working

One of the great things about the internet is that it allows us to connect huge numbers of people in the blink of an eye.

This capability is the backbone of the myriad of social networks which have popped up over the years -- right from the early days of usenet and Geocities through to today's Twitter, Facebook and the like.

The creation of "virtual crowds" has seen the appearance of concepts such as crowd-funding/sourcing, where large groups of people contribute a small amount of money each, towards a target goal. This has been an incredibly successful way to fund otherwise unfundable projects.

We've also seen virtual crowds work to achieve other goals -- such as in the SETI project.

By slicing up big jobs which require human intelligence, intuition or other skills and then distributing them to willing volunteers over the Net, we've been able to advance the cause of numerous projects such as those monitoring solar flares.

So I've been thinking (yes, I know that's a dangerous thing).

If just a million Kiwis gave up 15 minutes of their day to contribute time towards a crowd-project designed to lift this nation's game or help some worthy cause, imagine the huge value that would represent.

We're talking about 250,000 man-hours per day of human resource.

That's the equivalent of 130 people working full time for a year -- for each and every day that the project ran.

What a fantastic amount of human capital for such a tiny chunk of your day.

Of course the big problem is finding suitable applications for this highly fragmented human capital. Clearly, not many tasks could be easily or efficiently broken up into a million tiny fragments then reconstituted into a singular result.

However, perhaps that only seems daunting because we haven't actually applied ourselves to coming up with such applications before.

One example that springs to mind is market surveys.

We know that companies pay market-research organisations *huge* amounts of money to survey the population and analyse the data so that they can better design and market their products. This is usually done by way of "focus groups" or rather small surveys that have a highish margin of error.

What if you created a survey pool (a virtual crowd) that could be "hired" by market researchers for a fee such that they would get hundreds of thousands of responses to their questions. In return for access to that pool, the research companies would pay a fee which would then be added to a pool that could be distributed to worthy charities.

I know that I would be more than happy to "gift" 15 minutes of my day to such a routine if it meant that worthy causes were going to benefit as a result.

Then there are things such as the hunt for downed aircraft, missing boats and such.

Satellite imagery can produce *masses* of raw images which may contain important details as to the location of missing persons, boats or aircraft lost at sea. By taking that data and chopping it up into a million or more segments then distributing those segments to a virtual crowd, the time taken to find such a needle in a haystack could be dramatically reduced and perhaps lives could be saved. If each of the million crowd-members were given images that covered just half a square kilometer of sea... 500,000 square Km could be searched in minutes.

Okay... perhaps I'm getting a little too altruistic in my old age and maybe this is a bit pie-in-the-sky, but there have to be plenty of opportunities to improve the world through the presence of large virtual-crowds who are willing to donate small amounts of their time and energies to worthy causes. What else do hundreds of millions of people around the world have to do while riding the bus or train to work in the morning?

Can we turn waste-time into a huge asset?

Please visit the sponsor!

Have your say in the Aardvark Forums.

PERMALINK to this column

Rank This Aardvark Page

Change Font