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.
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