Crowdsource a country clean? Yes we can.

February 14th, 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti

Going on vacation to a beautiful beach can be depressing. No matter how secluded you are, littering the coastline will be the evidence that we are trashing our planet.

As global consumption spirals upwards, personal responsibility seems to be at an all time low. Everyday, millions of plastic bottles are thrown into our oceans, where they slowly drift into massive floating garbage patches. The last great virgin rain forests of the world are disappearing as fast as endangered species lists are growing. Faced with this depressing reality, apathy seems the only logical solution: one individual cannot make a difference.

Happily, one organization has shown that this is not true: if we all clean up our act, we can make a difference. Let’s do it! is an Estonian platform that calls on the crowd to tackle illegal waste. Only 3 years old, Let’s do it! has achieved some remarkable things. In 2008, it mobilized 3% of Estonia’s population to clean up 10,000 tons of litter. For free. In one day.

Let’s do it again?
Ahti Heinla, one of the former funders of Skype and now programmer at Let’s do it!, says: “The same action day has been repeated, not only in Estonia, but in 9 countries – Slovenia, Portugal, Lithuania and others – with 1.3 million volunteers in total. Everywhere, we have been able to get most infrastructure and services for free.”

Let’s do it! mobilizes the crowd using a combination of social networks and old-fashioned media campaigning. Basically, the organization will try anything short of summoning Captain Planet to get people picking up litter. It has worked with charities, banks, national airlines, celebrities, neighborhoods and even armies (nothing like a tank to make kids put their gum in the trash). The organization is also open to working with other crowdsourcing services, such as the crowd management app Groundcrew (discussed previously on the blog) “These are great initiatives”, says Ahti, “and could be used to organize field activity in some of our cleanups”.

A lean, clean machine
As well as direct action, Let’s do it! has created online maps of global waste hot spots. Map data is obtained by a combination of users uploading photos and (here’s the science bit) automatic harvesting of geo-located images from Flickr, Picasa and similar services. The photos – over 260,000 have been harvested so far – are filtered, then handed over to microworkers who sort and categorize them. (Looking at the finished result, it’s clear that either Russia is the cleanest country on earth, or the map is biased in favor of Flickr-friendly regions like Western Europe and the US.)

The combination of public archives, data-mining and human intelligence makes Let’s do it! a cost-effective way to target waste, and a great way to mobilize the masses. The platform has a simple ideology: one person, one action, one day at a time can make a real difference. This vision is backed up by a powerful technical system, able to manage and coordinate large-scale direct action.

In the end, the ultimate goal of Let’s do it! is to clean itself out of business – energizing the whole of society into voluntary action until litter gets wiped off the map.