

Crowdsourcing Jobs to a Worldwide Mobile Workforce - cwan
http://www.technologyreview.com/business/26651/?p1=A5

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patio11
Given that there doesn't seem to be any question of poor Africans doing useful
work for Western multinationals, and this is basically structured as an aid
giveaway... could it be an _effective_ aid giveaway? One big problem with aid
is that donor money gets siphoned off by corrupt governments and, ahem, aid
organizations. If crediting someone with call time is as good as cash, which I
have heard is increasingly the case in countries which have never had a stable
currency, maybe we can just cut out the middlemen and deal with the intended
beneficiaries directly. (That is a big "maybe", given that poor people's
problems are a wee bit more extensive than "I have no money.")

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brianbreslin
i see a flaw in this model though. if i'm a western company not doing business
in kenya, what do i really want low-skill laborers to do? I don't want them
filling out surveys as they are unlikely to be my target audience. I think
things like recognizing an object might work, but then you would need graphics
capable phones... maybe i'm missing something here.

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blake8086
I had described nearly this exact idea to my wife while walking around
downtown Seattle. The only difference was I was trying to figure out a way to
give the phones away for free also.

It would be fantastic if doing tasks on a phone was a better use of time than
begging on a street. I hope this works out.

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hugh3
I tend to think that anyone sufficiently intelligent, motivated and sane to be
performing tasks for money is unlikely to be found begging on the streets of
Seattle. To be truly, homelessly poor in America you pretty much have to have
something seriously wrong with you -- whatever it is, it's likely to make you
a pretty damn unreliable worker.

But hey, I'm sure they'd be willing to take the free phones.

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HeyLaughingBoy
You'd be surprised: I sure was.

I got into a long conversation with a homeless guy outside 4th Avenue records
(I think that's what it's called? been a while) in Manhattan a long time ago.
It turns out that he was laid off from a programming job in a financial firm
(this took place in the mid 90's) and he claimed to make over $900/day
panhandling. Of course I didn't believe the programming thing, but he answered
all my technical questions well enough that either he was one really well read
homeless person, or he was telling the truth! However, based on what I saw, I
could believe he was making hundreds of $$ per day.

Then again, maybe he was laid off because he just couldn't hold down a job, I
dunno!

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hga
We can be pretty sure he's the exception rather than the rule; check out the
statistics (I can dig them up if you wish), but as I remember the vast
plurality if not the majority of the homeless are the mentally ill who would
have been in institutions prior to the misguided deinstitutionalization effort
that didn't provide them with alternatives that worked.

Once you separate out the "if a Republican is present there are homeless, if a
Democrat they disappear" propaganda, there's quite a bit of serious research
on this subject. I certainly know that the vast majority of homeless I
encountered on the streets of the Cambridge, MA area in the early to mid-80s
were clearly mentally ill, sometimes severely so (e.g. frank schizophrenia).

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ig1
It's essentially mturk using text messaging.

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mathgladiator
I've thought about building a kiosk for homeless people to spit out pennies
and nickles...

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dnsworks
I'm reminded of Japanese intelligence gathering methods in the days leading up
to Pearl Harbor. This would be a hell of an intelligence gathering tool, the
best part of it is that you could gather data in such a fractioned and
distributed way that individual people wouldn't be able to guess what it is
they're doing.

