About

The Elevator Pitch:

The Extraordinaries delivers micro-volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be done on-demand and on-the-spot.

90 Second Promotional Video:

The Problem:
Busy people rarely volunteer. In the rat race of 60-hour workweeks, going to school, running errands, and driving kids to soccer games, many people wish to give back but only have small increments of free time. Most volunteer opportunities require training, vetting, and lengthy time-commitments.  In short, we live in a nation where the barriers to volunteering are too high and where we’re underutilizing the skills of those who overcome the obstacles to participation.

The Extraordinary Solution:
The Extraordinaries proposes to deliver skills-based volunteer tasks to people whenever and wherever they are available by mobile phone. Over 80% of the adult U.S. population carries a mobile phone in his or her pocket and the higher-end of these diminuative devices, so called “smartphones,” are as capable as any laptop computer. Nearly anything that can be done on a personal computer can be done on a smartphone. The Extraordinaries dramatically reduce the barriers to giving back by enabling people to volunteer on-the-spot and on-demand.

The Promise:
The result of dropping these barriers may be explosive. Suddenly, it becomes possible to volunteer during spare time. So instead of making a lengthy time-commitment to a single organization on a single day per year, you can volunteer for many organizations many times throughout the week.

Most of us don’t have a Saturday to dedicate to a cause, but we do have ad-hoc moments of spare time…lots of it. Despite busy schedules, we often find ourselves waiting: for the metro, in line for a haircut, at the doctor’s office, when there’s not a lot to do at work, or when a friend is late to dinner. What could we do in these moments? Some possibilities:

•    Translating a nonprofit’s Website into a foreign language
•    Recording the GPS location of potholes and city infrastructure issues for municipalities
•    Identifying birds for the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
•    Tagging images for the Smithsonian
•    Transcribing ancient texts for ReCaptcha
•    Reviewing congressional bills for hidden pork
•    Fact checking for reporters
 
Each of these tasks is infinitely repeatable and incredibly valuable. For example, using NASA’s crater identification program called Clickworkers (currently only available on the Web), tens of thousands of volunteers, many working for just a few minutes here and there, accurately classified 88,000 images in less than a month. The same task had taken a professional scientist two years to accomplish.

Clickworkers and the other tasks listed above fall into the category of work called crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee and farming it out to an unpaid or unprofessional group of volunteers. Typically, these tasks are small, requiring only a few minutes to complete.

Crowdsourcing is a new term, but it’s already been transformational. Some of the most successful businesses use crowdsourcing techniques to generate tremendous value. Within two years of its founding, iStockPhoto dominated the stock photography industry by crowdsourcing its photographs. Threadless generated over $17 million in revenue by crowdsourcing T-shirt design. Innocentive has solved some of industry’s toughest scientific problems by crowdsourcing solutions from amateur experimentalists. And the grand-daddy of crowdsourcing, Wikipedia, has generated millions of reference articles by thousands of amateur writers who have a passion for participation.

Thus far, no-one has brought crowdsourcing to mobile phones… the device that’s always on-hand when people have spare time. And while there have been one-off efforts to turn crowdsourcing to social good, no-one has built an organization dedicated to the purpose. With The Extraordinaries, we’re pioneering a promising new field.

What kind of organization is this?
The Extraordinaries is in the process of becoming a B-Corp. We've been considering alternate types of entity formation for months and have ended up here. What an educational process. The premise is: our mission is to create social good - to enliven and stregthen social causes via crowdsourced volunteerism. After much research and debate, the B-Corp seems like the best structure to enable us to acheive this mission. 

Comments

[Miriam, AmeriCorps VISTA]

Such an exciting idea--I can't wait to see what happens with this as you begin launching the software. One potential hitch I see is, how will nonprofits know to use this? I think it takes great skill to be able to develop a volunteer task that can be done in these microbits. Yet that's what's critical to making sure the project has an impact. What is being done to educate nonprofits on how to use this technology? Giving some guidance on strategies to design an effective "Extraordinaire" project I think would prove highly useful for NPOs. Just a thought!

[Ben]

Thanks for the comment Miriam. Agreed, there's a good degree of education and training that will need to happen to ensure that many nonprofits can make use of the service that we're providing. That's why we're starting with the organizations who have already got crowdsourcing programs up and running (Cornell University, NASA, Smithsonian, New York Times/ReCaptcha) and are working with a select few orgs to help develop crowdsourcing initiatives as a proof of concept. We'll focus our (very) limited resources on orgs with sure-fire mobile successes on their hands.

Once we've got the proof of concept launched, we'll spend time on broader education initiatives. And we'll also work on software that enables nonprofits to tie their existing workflow/infrastructure (ie: Rasers Edge, Kintera, NetCommunity, etc) directly into our system.

I know many nonprofit directors will be thinking: "Oh no - another new technology that we've got to worry about" ... It's already so hard to keep up with "Web2.0" advances on chronically stretched resources. So, it's our intention to clearly demonstrate the value proposition/ROI among a limited number of orgs - and then to develop tools and resources to enable other orgs to join in.

Of course, we'll have the private sector to look to for examples as well. There are already a crop of "crowdsourcing consultants" who are showing businesses how to improve their bottom line by way of the crowd.

[Miriam, AmeriCorps VISTA]

Amazing--sounds like you all have a great plan to roll this out! Again, just really excited about this fascinating new look at volunteerism. It makes so much sense and at the same time I'm still trying to wrap my head around it. Look forward to your updates!

[Chris Rocco]

I'm not clear what a B-Corp is. I went to the linked site, but didn't find a concise description within about 3 minutes of poking around the site. I felt like the site was marketing B-Corp to me, rather than offering a simple description of what B-Corp is... which gives me an uneasy feeling.

Anyway... what this is leading up to is this: Why aren't you guys some form of a non-profit company? I like the idea of civic duty, but I don't like the idea that hundreds/thousands/millions of people like me are going to give micro-donations in the form of our time, and The Extraordinaries is going to make money from our efforts.

Am I just supposed to trust that The Extraordinaries will do the right thing with the money you earn, or am I missing something about what a B-Corp is?

Thanks for your time.

[Ben]

Chris, that's a great question. Thanks for giving me/us the opportunity to answer it - as it's something we discussed long and pondered deeply. I've written up some thoughts here: http://www.theextraordinaries.org/entity-types-research-thoughts.html -

I'd love to know if your opinion changes after reading about our journey through this research and decision.

-ben

[Liz]

I thought you had to prove you are a non-profit to get a .org domain?

[kevin]

Will use. But please design an app for itouch. I can't be calling any other way but via Skype.

[cohendc]

Is it possible to participate by way of a computer, more particular a macintosh (ie, not through a cell phone).