"Our new iPhone application brings the latest Seafood Watch recommendations directly to your iPhone or iPod touch. Now you can make sustainable seafood choices quickly and easily—whether you’re eating at your favorite restaurant or shopping for dinner. And at a time when the world’s oceans are severely overfished, your seafood choices make a big difference.
Features? Free, up-to-date recommendations at your fingertips Sushi guide lists fish by Japanese name as well as common market name Regional guides highlight the seafood that’s best in each area of the country New! Search to find seafood quickly and easily within regions."
Thanks to Jeroen for sending a link to this collaborative annotation service called A.nnotate. I suppose it's not quite crowdsourcing b/c there is no open call... so it's just collaboration... but the system itself is rather interesting and could be used to crowdsource. I write this as I'm wrapping up the back-end of our crowdsourcing micro-app for annotation & translation. Also in this category is ReFrameIt http://blip.tv/file/957958 - (the site seems down though... hope it's still around. A great idea).
"Congratulations! Echoing Green has selected you as a finalist for our 2009 fellowship program. This alone is a significant accomplishment. When Echoing Green closed our application process in December, we had received nearly 1,000 applications. Of those many candidates, only 22, approximately 2%, have been invited to interview with our judging panel in early May. From this final group, 15 organizations will be selected to receive an Echoing Green Fellowship."
We're incredibly excited, grateful, and humbled by this announcement! Being involved in the Echoing Green application process has helped to clarify our thinking and forced us to complete several key pieces of our business plan. We're honored to be considered, and we can't wait to meet all the amazing folks in New York. To find out more, click here: http://www.echoinggreen.org/
Thanks to all of our friends, supporters, and family who have helped us through this process.
I was just listening to NPR's Planet Money podcast #21- A New Plan for Toxic Assets and heard this little snippet about the problem with toxic assets:
'Critical to getting a market going is some way of describing what's in [these toxic assets]. It's a problem of information. You can't just sell people a black box. You have to assemble as much detail as you can reasonably get on what's actually in [these toxic assets]. And that's hard to do. If you're talking about thousands of home mortgages, you can't go into the detail of each borrower.' ~Min: 9:30
Did I hear that right? Is the solution to market liquidity a problem of labor? If we have 1000s of people who could dive into the credit history and detail of each borrower, would we be able to grease the market and liquidate the toxic assets at agreed-upon prices?
Moreover, can we task the crowd on this task?? If this is what's meant by giving back to your country... if spending a few minutes here and a few there to assemble details about borrower histories will fix the problem, then I've got a feeling that we'd all do our part - and make quick work of it.
I know nothing is ever that simple... but as the problem was laid out on Planet Money, it seems that the assumption of the problem forgoes a crowdsourced solution.
Our buddy Nathaniel Whittemore passed along someone looking for research subjects, and we're always happy to help!
Here's the nice note and the link:
Hi Jacob,
My name is Chiara Camponeschi and I am writing to you based on a recommendation made to me by Nathaniel Whittemore.
I am currently working on a study on Virtual Volunteering as part of my Masters of Environmental Studies program at York University, in Canada. I am investigating the motivational factors that lead young people between the ages of 18-30 to volunteer on-line, and what can be done to improve their overall experience as on-line agents of change. As I am sure you know, many not-for-profits are now relying on the support of dedicated virtual volunteers, but at present not much literature is available on them. For this reason, I have put together a survey to learn more about who the typical volunteer is, what motivates youth to donate their time and skills for a cause or organization, what are some of the current difficulties they face, etc.
Because I believe volunteering and gift economies are an important part of social innovation, I would be grateful if you could promote this study to your network:
Are You A Virtual Volunteer? Fill Out The Survey Today!
Virtual Volunteering is a type of volunteer work that is carried out on-line through the use of ICTs. If you are currently a Virtual Volunteer, or have volunteered on-line in the past, fill out the survey today! You will contribute to an academic study that looks at the factors that inspire youth to volunteer on-line and what can be done to improve their overall experience as on-line agents of change!
Thanks to Dale for forwarding this compelling talk from Nathan Eagle - He's a like-minded colleague doing mobile phone crowdsourcing in Africa. Awesome.
Their main challenge is drumming up tasks. 15 million Africans ready to start working. We've heard similar from Kiva - where they need to find more people to loan to. Our volunteer research typically finds the same - many more people ready and willing to do work than there is work to do.
I wonder if we'll be able to increase the quantity of tasks by using the smartphone - which opens broad new territory in the types of work that can be done. But overall, this talk and our research thus far points to the idea that we're going to have to teach orgs how to chunk up their needs into bite sized tasks.
Also interesting to note the Africa/US context switch. Where to do good in Africa, one wants to create jobs for people. Whereas in US - and using smartphones - we're taking the direction of enabling volunteers to generate value for nonprofits. Same idea in both places but with different value propositions.
"The number of people using mobile devices to access news and information on the Internet more than doubled in the past year, according to figures released by market firm ComScore this week.
"With the surge in worldwide subscribers for mobile Internet it is projected that the number of mobile internet subscribers will soon surpass 550 million and account for 39 percent of overall Internet users. And the number is expected to reach 1.5 billion by 2012, at which time it will account for 79 percent of overall Internet users."
Mobile surpasses traditional web in South Africa : http://www.matthewbuckland.com/?p=573 - actually shows that mobile internet connections are double traditional in South Africa
"According to Greg Joswiak, VP of iPhone marketing, users have now downloaded more than 800 million applications from the store — a 60% increase in two months." (http://Fortune.CNN.com)
Not only are download numbers breaking all records, the speed at which Apple is hitting these download milestones is like nothing we've ever seen.
The last two months have been amazing, and we're so grateful to all of the wonderful people out there who have been supportive of our efforts. Each day we're getting closer and closer to the point where we can launch, but also to the point when you can start having an impact.
Closer to when you can help lower the cost of language translations for nonprofits, or help the Library of congress bring entire photographic eras of history online. Closer to when you can help add subtitles to films like "Child Brides" making that important film more accessible to women around the world, and teaching them that they CAN demand more.
But, before you can start helping all of these amazing organizations, we need you to help us.
The Extraordinaries has just submitted a proposal to NetSquared's N2Y4 Mobile Competition. With your help, we will raise awareness of our efforts and secure a win at the N2Y4 Conference this May in San Jose, California. A win means additional seed funding to help with further development, and a sturdier foundation for us.
So Extraordinaries, if you're ready to accept your next mission, click this link to visit our project on NetSquared's website. If you're a registered member of NetSquared, support our project by adding a star (click the GREEN PLUS BUTTON below the word "STAR") and an encouraging comment to our project page! This is important to show community support for our idea.
Thanks so much for your help, we can't do this without you.
It's Michelle Obama tilling the new vegetable garden on the South Lawn of the Whitehouse. Tilling up that unreal artificial green turf to plant veggies. I got a quick burst of joy and said to Mike, the guy who works the counter, "They're planting vegetables on the South Lawn." He nodded.
So then I got to thinking about gardening and a post a little while back about MyFarm. A service that rents out your backyard to grow veggies for the neighborhood. I was reminded of the idea that - if you modify this service slightly by having people manage their own gardens - and offer some sort of general neighborhood plan that ensures good distribution of veggies - and be sure to give people the gardening tips they need to be successful, then you've got the equivalent of Wikipedia in our backyards.
You've got real-world analog crowdsourcing. There's a rough structure put in place - there is enough information to get started - and then the crowd does (or grows) the rest - thereby creating a product that is greater than the sum of its parts (a box of free locally grown veggies with a lot of variety for every participant). Lead the way Michelle.
