One way to combat extreme poverty is by creating employment opportunities so that people can help themselves, rather than giving them free shoes, or corn, or wells, all of which are suboptimal for meeting their varied pressing needs. So our approach is to hire them to do human computation work.
How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries? Will you be tying up with some agencies back there? Because you will not be able to find them over the internet.
You will also need strong mechanisms in place for quality control of the process so that the output is usable. I’m guessing a lot of the problems you will face will be similar to other crowdsourcing ventures like Mechanical Turk.
Yes, Mechanical Turk is another platform that enables human computation work. We looked a lot at that in our early research. It does not, however, implement any internal quality control mechanisms, and it also only allows payment in US dollars, Indian rupees, or via Amazon gift card. The interface is also clunky and difficult for people with limited computer/internet experience to understand (too many windows within windows, basically).
So there are a number of reasons to sidestep Mechanical Turk.
Great points. I have personal connections in some poor rural areas of Kenya already (and already in that place, people are always asking, “How can I join?”, both of me and of the current workers). My colleagues also have connections in a number of other developing countries where we could plant “seeds”. How to grow the “crowd” from those seeds is an interesting problem, but not insurmountable, what with ever-increasing mobile phone/3G penetration and a mobile interface to our platform (lots of people in Kenya, for example, have a low end mobile phone or internet-capable “feature phone” while still living in mud huts), a franchise model using netbooks and small solar stations, etc.
As for quality control, you’re absolutely right. There are a lot of ways to approach that (none of which Mturk implements). There’s some well-established precedent for methods that work, so we feel confident we can generate high quality outputs.
How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries?
Could humans be also used for doing this? Something like: “If you find other people to join this system, you will get 10% of their reward.”
Surely, this has a lot of negative connotations. This is what many scams do, because it is an efficient way to reach many people. To remove some connotations, perhaps the reward could be limited in time, for example you get 10% of other person’s reward only for 2 years. (To make it certain nobody is promissing you to “find 10 more people, and then you don’t have to work again, ever”.)
That’s definitely a possibility! Ideally we want to harness the natural creativity that fuels capitalism—so we want to allow some flexibility in how workers get recruited while still making sure the incentives are aligned to promote beneficial outcomes.
How are you planning to reach out to the poorest of the poor in developing countries? Will you be tying up with some agencies back there? Because you will not be able to find them over the internet.
You will also need strong mechanisms in place for quality control of the process so that the output is usable. I’m guessing a lot of the problems you will face will be similar to other crowdsourcing ventures like Mechanical Turk.
Yeah, the whole time I was thinking, “Hasn’t the guy heard of Mechanical Turk?′
I guess he could be using MTurk as a platform to do this on, although I don’t know haw much Amazon eats of your profit.
Yes, Mechanical Turk is another platform that enables human computation work. We looked a lot at that in our early research. It does not, however, implement any internal quality control mechanisms, and it also only allows payment in US dollars, Indian rupees, or via Amazon gift card. The interface is also clunky and difficult for people with limited computer/internet experience to understand (too many windows within windows, basically).
So there are a number of reasons to sidestep Mechanical Turk.
Great points. I have personal connections in some poor rural areas of Kenya already (and already in that place, people are always asking, “How can I join?”, both of me and of the current workers). My colleagues also have connections in a number of other developing countries where we could plant “seeds”. How to grow the “crowd” from those seeds is an interesting problem, but not insurmountable, what with ever-increasing mobile phone/3G penetration and a mobile interface to our platform (lots of people in Kenya, for example, have a low end mobile phone or internet-capable “feature phone” while still living in mud huts), a franchise model using netbooks and small solar stations, etc.
As for quality control, you’re absolutely right. There are a lot of ways to approach that (none of which Mturk implements). There’s some well-established precedent for methods that work, so we feel confident we can generate high quality outputs.
Upvoted. If you want a(n additional) “seed” in India, pls let me know. :)
Could humans be also used for doing this? Something like: “If you find other people to join this system, you will get 10% of their reward.”
Surely, this has a lot of negative connotations. This is what many scams do, because it is an efficient way to reach many people. To remove some connotations, perhaps the reward could be limited in time, for example you get 10% of other person’s reward only for 2 years. (To make it certain nobody is promissing you to “find 10 more people, and then you don’t have to work again, ever”.)
That’s definitely a possibility! Ideally we want to harness the natural creativity that fuels capitalism—so we want to allow some flexibility in how workers get recruited while still making sure the incentives are aligned to promote beneficial outcomes.