From millions of tasks to thousands of jobs: Bringing digital work to the developing world
February 1st, 2012 by Vili Lehdonvirta
Every country in the world has probably benefited in some way from the unprecedented access to knowledge and services brought about by the digital revolution. But producing the knowledge banks and services has so far been a predominately rich-country business. The world’s poorest countries have generally not been able to participate in the production side of the digital economy and share in its rewards. This is changing, however, and an initiative lead by the World Bank’s infoDev program is helping to shape the change.
As the digital economy grows, it increasingly gives rise to work that is “born digital” – that is, new work that arises out of the possibilities and needs of the digital world. This phenomenon is distinct from how conventional jobs are increasingly digitized in the sense of making heavy use of information and communication technologies. Most born-digital work represents new work that doesn’t directly compete with old occupations.
For example, hundreds of thousands of people around the world earn income from tasks like moderating images posted by users to an online community, categorizing products on an e-commerce site, and transcribing digital video clips to make them more searchable. Because these tasks are completely digital, they can be physically carried out anywhere where a computer can be connected to the Internet.
A recent trend is that demand for such digital blue-collar work is satisfied through so-called “crowdsourcing” and “microsourcing” models. This means that instead of a company hiring a staffer or a contractor to carry out a job, the job is broken down into individual tasks and distributed to a large pool of workers over a digital network.
For example, many companies post their tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), a digital labor marketplace. At any given time AMT carries around 200,000 microtasks, each worth from a few cents to several dollars. Anyone wishing to earn this money can simply point their web browser to AMT and follow the instructions. Microwork is inclusive in that gender, disability and other personal characteristics do not play a role in selection on digital labor marketplaces.
The World Bank’s mission is to reduce poverty in the world, and its infoDev program got interested in the potential of digital microwork to provide employment to poor people in developing countries. In 2010, I was commissioned by infoDev to co-author a report to assess this and related issues, titled Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy.
According to the report, microwork has several features that make it particularly accessible to people in developing countries. Most tasks require few skills or qualifications, as they rely on the fact that humans are inherently better than computers at tasks like image recognition and natural language processing. Microwork is relatively disintermediated, meaning that it is not necessary to find employment at a local business process outsourcing company to tap into the market – a web browser is enough. Low labor costs moreover give a competitive advantage to workers from developing countries.
Many microworkers are indeed located in the developing world. According to one survey, 34 percent of workers on AMT are from India. Two other microwork distributors, Samasource and MobileWorks, have workers in countries such as Kenya, Pakistan and the Philippines. Workers access the tasks from computers in Internet cafés and offices, and earn income in the form of cash, bank deposits and gift cards. In these low- to medium-developed countries, digital microwork seems to be having a real economic impact.
Least-developed countries would have the most to gain from tapping into this source of digital export income. However, their ability to do so is limited by their digital infrastructure: the availability of computers and Internet cafés from which to access digital labor markets.
But even the most underprivileged people in the world increasingly have access to mobile phones. There are over 5 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, and over half a billion in India alone. In 2011, mobile phone penetration reached almost 80 percent in the developing world. In the near future, typical mobile phones in the developing world will start to resemble personal computers in terms of features and Internet connectivity.
m2Work is an online challenge conducted by infoDev and IdeasProject, with funding and support from UKaid and the Government of Finland. The aim of the challenge is to identify problems and needs that could be addressed by tapping into microworkers who use mobile phones – enabling the bottom of the economic pyramid to access the digital economy, and enabling the rest of the world to benefit from their intelligence.
Challenge participants are asked to come up with ideas for mobile phone applications that link problems that could be tackled by microwork with microworkers located in the developing world. The best ideas are awarded cash prizes of up to $20,000 and supported in various ways with a view towards their eventual realization as, for example, startup companies. The slogan of the challenge is, “From millions of tasks to thousands of jobs”.
What would you do with a mobile workforce of millions? Submit your idea for a chance to make it reality.
Banking on one another: Can the crowd save itself from the banks?
January 26th, 2012 by Ville Miettinen
First they lend too much, cause a financial meltdown and need bailing out. Now they don’t lend enough (unless share-options and fat bonuses count as lending). As any former Wall St inhabitant, election-year politician or self-respecting Hollywood celebrity will tell you: banks are pure evil.
Personally, I quite like the banking system as a whole. Swiping a little plastic card in exchange for a pile of food is my favorite magic trick. Still, there’s no doubt the current system could be improved. And, you guessed it, crowdsourcing may be able to help, by offering an alternative way for people to borrow and lend money.
Models for (spare) change
A variety of crowd-based alternatives now provide ways for people to lend money to each other for profit, sidestepping the banks. As banks continue to clamp down on lending, these companies are seeing enormous growth.
The exchange begins with borrowers proposing an amount they want to borrow. Then, much like crowdfunding, lenders contribute to the loan until it reaches its goal and the borrower gets their money. Some companies like RateSetter automatically link lenders and borrowers by the rates they want. Others like Funding Circle, which specializes in funding for small businesses, allow lenders greater control.
Despite their growth, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending only accounts for around $270 million of lending in the US. Such a measly amount is nowhere near sufficient to meet demand caused by banks’ current unwillingness to lend.
The reasons for the small numbers (when did 270 million become a small number?) are numerous. There’s understandable reluctance from customers to manage their own lending. Crowdbanking (or maybe “distributed lending” anyone?) must also overcome unfriendly regulation, vested interests and an entrenched banking system that we still depend on even if it does go a little crazy now and then.
Law of the lever(age)
Ultimately, traditional banking has a key advantage over distributed lending: leverage. Because of its P2P model, the distributed lenders only lend as much money as their members put in. Corporations and banks can leverage capital to effectively create money out of thin air. Of course, this may be a good thing: the absence of leverage means P2P lenders can’t inflate themselves into oblivion and cause economic meltdowns.
So, are we on the cusp of a banking revolution, or is it just a flash in the pan? Assuming the hurdles mentioned above can be overcome, the question, I think, will come down to convenience and reliability. If P2P lending and borrowing is more economic than using a bank, and becomes as easy as bidding on eBay, why wouldn’t it catch on? With Google and Facebook already tinkering about with transaction services and even their own currencies, the stage is set for the shift in thinking that may enable this change. And we know that big things can happen when people tap the power of the crowd.
Of course, if it all collapses, we can always fall back on a system of barter. Which will be good for plumbers and carpenters, but not so good for us at Microtask (you try bartering microtasks in exchange for a cheeseburger at 1am).
Food52: a recipe for crowdsourcing success?
January 23rd, 2012 by Ville Miettinen
Take the following ingredients:
. Two award-winning cookery writers.
. One eager food-loving crowd.
. A sprinkling of game mechanics.
Mix them all together and what do get? Answer: Food52. Founded in 2009 by New York Times journalists Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, the site is described as a “social hub for people who love to cook”. As well as debating burning culinary questions (just how do you make a vegan omelet?), Food52 runs regular crowdsourced recipe contests. Members of the community submit their finest gourmet creations, which are tested and voted for by the crowd. Winning recipes are awarded prizes and eventually published.
Aside from the crowdsourcing element, what struck me most about Food52 is how good the site looks. Food-wise Amanda and Merrill may be “all about simplicity”, but there’s nothing homemade about their presentation. Winning crowdsourced recipes are accompanied by mouth-watering professional photos (warning: this is not a site for dieters). No doubt this acts as a participation incentive: “enter our contest and we’ll make your Grandma’s cookies look like something out of a glossy magazine”.
Food52: the secret’s in the (crowd)source
As they explain in this video, when it comes to crowdsourcing, Amanda and Merrill are practical, rather than idealistic: “it’s a great way to get lots of content but it’s completely useless unless you can curate and filter it”. This is a fair point, but I think too much top-down control can also disengage users. If every cupcake recipe is rigorously monitored and filtered, the Food52 community may (understandably) start to feel the site doesn’t “belong” to them.
Food52 clearly has big ambitions. This year the company began a (no doubt very lucrative) partnership with US health food giant Whole Foods. They have also just launched a Holiday Cookbook iPad app. It’s still early days but, for now, Food52 seems to have cornered the market in “cooking social”.
Confidence tricks: can crowdsourcing keep our feet on the ground?
January 18th, 2012 by Ville Miettinen
Charles Darwin once wrote that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
Despite how far society has progressed since this was written, it seems as relevant now as it ever was. Whether it’s refusing to stop and ask for directions because we’re sure we know the right way (only to find ourselves lost in the wilderness), or setting the treadmill too fast and ending up in a spluttering heap on the gym floor, most of us can relate to its sentiment.
But misplaced confidence can go beyond slapstick, with devastating consequences. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the continued resistance to tackling climate change are arguably two such examples.
Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing
But what makes us overconfident in our judgments? And what keeps those with valuable knowledge in the background? Research from social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning may explain why we get it wrong so often.
Their experiments revealed that people generally overestimate their ability in areas they understand poorly, and underestimate their ability where their understanding is good. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and is one of many cognitive biases that affect us all.
Only the lonely
In a world where we’re told to think big and believe in ourselves, can we avoid becoming victims of our own accidental arrogance? The Dunning-Kruger Effect has one important limit: it only applies to individuals (except me, of course). This is where the crowd may offer a way to keep our feet on the ground.
Here at Microtask we’ve seen that by having multiple members of the crowd complete the same task we can achieve far better accuracy than by relying on individual judgment. But the potential of the crowd may take us much further.
Research into collective reasoning focuses on the concept of the wise crowd, a group which mixes experts and amateurs. In a wise crowd, laypeople are free to ask difficult questions and offer unorthodox solutions that experts may not consider. In turn, the experts are required to explain their observations and conclusions, and to be transparent in their reasoning.
United we stand
The power of the wise crowd depends on its diversity. By replacing the traditional team of experts, each with their own specialist area (like the one that produced the Deepwater Horizon risk assessment), with a wise crowd, it may be possible to sidestep the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Members of the crowd are encouraged to think for themselves and to be skeptical of bold claims. The crowd prioritizes clarity and results rather than blind confidence.
The crowd’s potential for new, better forms of reasoning raises exciting possibilities for the future, but how far could it go? Could crowd power show us the way to a more rational form of society? The Arab Spring has shown the power of the crowd to overthrow dictatorial regimes but so far most attempts at using crowdsourcing to design better alternatives have met with limited success (Iceland’s constitution being one of a few exceptions).
Despite such setbacks, as we learn to use crowdsourcing more effectively, I am certain that it will solve all the world’s problems caused by overconfidence. Absolutely, 100% certain.
Better shred than read: DARPA uses competitive crowdsourcing to revive destroyed documents
January 12th, 2012 by Ville Miettinen
As if things weren’t already hard enough for them, crooked bankers , deposed dictators and international super villains have one more thing to worry about. Having spent their last hours of freedom shredding incriminating evidence into neat strips, they might have thought they could get away with their misdeeds. It turns out however that those shredded documents might not be as unreadable as they thought.
Our old friends at DARPA (or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency if you have the time) decided that there might be something worth reading on those strips. They wanted to create software that could identify scanned strips and piece them together as quickly as possible.
Money to learn
DARPA’s annual budget is $3.2 billion. They could have hired a crack team of programmers without making a scratch on that figure. But even the best programmers in the world are only going to come up with one solution at a time. Knowing that crowdsourcing would provide a variety of possible solutions, DARPA decided to establish a crowdsourced competition.
With a first prize of $50,000 (much cheaper than hiring programmers) the “Shredder Challenge” had five challenges of increasing difficulty. In a clever bit of gamification, each document consisted of a puzzle that could only be solved when the document had been stitched back together. Entrants won the prize by being the first to submit all the correct puzzle answers.
“All your shreds are belong to U.S.” was the meme themed team that got their entries in ahead of everyone else and a full two days before the deadline. The team of only three San Francisco based programmers had just 35 days to complete the task. They spent 600 man-hours spent building the algorithms which made suggestions of shreds that might fit together.
Suspicious finds
DARPA claims they came up with the Shredder Challenge for soldiers to use in the battlefield (presumably for when they find that bunker full of shredded MapQuest directions to the W.M.Ds) and also uncover potential vulnerabilities in U.S. Government document disposal practices. Conspiracy theorists will surely claim it’s only a matter of time before the software is turned on us ordinary decent folk with nothing to hide (except maybe some irregular tax returns).
Should we throw out our shredders then? Well there is no news of a slump in shredder sales. The thing is, even if the software was cheap and freely available someone still has to get hold of the paper shreds, laboriously scan them all, then reassemble them after the software has worked its magic. You would have to have something pretty important in those shreds (pirate treasure maps?) for someone to go to all that trouble.
DARPA’s intentions seem pretty straight forward. In fact for a government agency tasked with “preventing and creating strategic surprise” they are very open about many of their projects. It’s difficult to make use of crowdsourcing without the crowd having some idea of what you are doing, which is great for the rest of us because every now and then we find out about a tantalizing DARPA project.
As we have seen before in this blog DARPA has certainly caught the crowdsourcing bug, and is well positioned to experiment with different crowdsourcing models. This is great for the industry as a whole. With DARPA blazing a crowdsourced trail, other organizations that were unsure about how to use crowdsourcing may find a DARPA method that suits their needs.
