Tech Tuesday: Crowdsourcing and Micro-volunteering

Crowdsourcing and micro-volunteering are both just specialized messaging - two or more people leaving notes to each other.  With a couple of tweaks, though, they can become powerful tools.

Crowdsourcing is a way for an organization to access the collective intelligence of the people who support their cause.  Before I explain the what it looks like, I’m going to duck into something called the birthday paradox.  It’s posed in the form of a question: how many people do you need to get in a room before there’s a 50% chance that two of them share a birthday.  The surprising (at least to me) answer is 23.  In a group of 57 people there’s a 99% chance that two or more of them were born the same day of the year.

Back to crowdsourcing, here’s my point: given a decent-sized crowd, it’s amazing how often one of them is just the right person.  You need to know the name of a good copyright lawyer in town who does pro-bono work?, or what’s a reasonable price to pay for a used commercial oven?  With enough ears, someone with personal experience will be able to tell you.  Five seconds of typing can save hours of research, or worse.

How this is going to work in Urbantastic is simple.  First an organization asks a question, which then gets put into people’s feeds.  For people who have asked to be notified of this category of question, we’ll send out an email to them.  From there, whoever has an answer can reply.  Once the org considers the question answered (or unanswerable), it becomes closed and whoever responded gets rewarded with recognition (how often they answer questions goes on their profile page) and credits (those are a whole other blog post).

In addition to asking questions, organizations can also put out polls.  This is a great way to do research and get reality-checks: want to know what people think is the most important challenge to tackle first?  Or how to price your new service?  Or if they think your new plan’s going to fly?  Answering polls are insanely quick and easy and they provide tons of value to orgs working for causes you believe in.

Micro-volunteering is essentially the same thing except it results in real-world actions taking place.  Imagine this not-unusual situation: a non-profit is moving to a new office and they need to move their (previously donated) couch.  Paying a moving company is a terrible way to spend scarce resources, and the population of people with big trucks and equally big hearts could certainly be used.  It’s only a question of connecting the org with the person - suddenly a win-win situation emerges from a distracting and costly problem.

Back in November we had a prototype of the micro-volunteering system up and running and within two weeks we got some documents reformatted, photoshop work was completed, a report on donation via text message was drafted, and information on promotional music licensing was answered.  It was great, and we’ve been spending our time since then figuring out how to make it work on a larger scale.

We’ve been adding features to the site in order of engagement (for instance, reading the feed or joining a posse is zero-commitment and easy to get into) and so the two features I’ve been discussing in this post have got a couple of things before them on the list.  Having said that, and no promises, we’re aiming to have rudimentary versions of both in by April.

In the next post I’m going to get hyper-nerdy and talk a little about the technology behind the site.  It’s not the usual stuff by any stretch…


Heath