Sparked Blog

There are two major barriers to doing social good in our society: time and convenience.

We reduce the time cost by focusing on tasks that only require a few minutes, and we increase convenience by delivering tasks on-demand directly to the volunteer. In short, we make it ridiculously easy for people to do social good by catering to the needs of the person doing the task.

While crowdsourcing has been used for corporations to develop products, no one has used this approach in the context of mainstream volunteering. Our challenge is to change the old thinking about what a volunteer experience should be. In the rat race of 60-hour workweeks, errands, kids, and more, most busy people don’t have time to engage in traditional volunteering. We can help!

With proven field tests of our new model, we can help people see that extraordinary social good can occur through micro-parsed utilization of a population's spare human energy. Smartphone technology can drastically improve efficiency of volunteering – we just have to start thinking differently about how people utilize their spare time and skills for social good.

The media industry recognizes the value of brief spare time. Apple offers more than 100,000 audio and video podcasts from independent creators and big names like HBO, NPR, ESPN, CBS, and more! Podcasts are based on the ability to access content on-demand during spare time, and have obviously been a huge hit. Why can’t we use this same spare time for social good?

Our approach is simple, elegantly done, and unique. No other organization has found a comparable way to reduce the time cost, broaden access to opportunities, and use smartphones to facilitate the process. We feel that a task must be "do-able" in several minutes. It must fit in the daily schedule of a busy person without much hassle. And ideally, a person can access those tasks on-demand, at anytime, from anywhere.

(Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu)

73% of Americans do not volunteer, and nearly half say it’s because they don’t have time (2007, 2005 US Dept Labor).

We cut the time cost from several hours to several minutes and deliver tasks directly to the volunteer via smartphones. Using mobile puts a direct link to social good in the pockets of over 100 million people, 24/7/365. It simply couldn’t be more convenient.

Our system is perfectly suited for youth born between 1980 and 2000 (millennials), the approaching dominant volunteer demographic. Over 75 million strong, millenials were raised on SMS, social networking, blogging, photo and video sharing, games, and more. Nearly 30 million millennials will subscribe to mobile social networking services by the year 2012 (InStat).

We expect an explosion of new volunteers, as people are now able to actually fit micro tasks into their hectic lives. We provide a more efficient link between people’s brief spare time and social projects, and as new people get hooked on doing social good, we believe this will lead them to an increased engagement in their communities. Essentially, The Extraordinaries is the “gateway drug” to traditional volunteering.

Already, there are many examples in which the crowd uses spare time to perform good deeds:

At NASA, a program called Clickworkers used the crowd to explore Mars. People logged in for a few minutes and drew circles around craters using the computer mouse. From 11/17/00 to 01/03/02, over 101,000 people spent 14,000 hours tagging 2,378,820 crater entries. Everyday people literally helped NASA explore space, from their own computer in their own spare time.

Volunteers have written Wikipedia’s 12 million articles collaboratively over the last eight years, and an average of 9% of global Internet users visit the site everyday (Alexa.com).

CNN uses the crowd to generate news. iReporters have generated 225,000 reports worldwide with over 1,000 appearing on CNN last month alone (ireport.com).

We can now facilitate all of this on smartphones.

(Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu)

It has always been a challenge to tap a volunteer for a few moments. It’s a management issue, and a productivity issue. What good can someone actually do in such short time? Then in 2007, Apple introduced iPhone and revolutionized the mobile industry. It was just the beginning, as mobile is now the focus of innovation for Apple, Google, and more.

With smartphones, we finally have mobile Internet fast enough and devices powerful enough to make someone truly productive from any place with cell reception. It is now possible to harness a few minutes, and have it actually matter. Realizing this was our moment of obligation: How can we use this technology for social good?

So, we created mobile smartphone software designed to facilitate crowdsourcing (a large task, broken into little pieces, and worked on by many people). Typically, these tasks are small, requiring only a few minutes to complete.

Many successful businesses use crowdsourcing. In only two years, iStockPhoto dominated the stock photo industry by crowdsourcing its photographs. InnoCentive has solved tough scientific problems by crowdsourcing solutions from amateur scientists. Wikipedia uses crowdsourcing to generate millions of articles from amateur writers.

We bring crowdsourcing to mainstream volunteering.

We have completed iteration one of our iPhone software and we will soon launch pilot tests. Over the next five years, we will expand to Blackberry, Google Android, Windows Mobile, and more. We will also launch a desktop widget to give regular computer users the ability to use a few moments for social good as well.

With millions of smart phones being sold over the next few years, anyone with a few minutes free will be able to log in and contribute to projects for social good, and use their collective spare energy to advance humankind. As people get hooked on doing good through easy, short, and non-intimidating tasks, this will act to feed new people to traditional volunteering and increased engagement.

Problem: 73% of Americans do not volunteer (2007 US Dept Labor).

Root Cause: Most volunteer opportunities require vetting, many hours, and a long-term commitment. It’s akin to a second job. For most people, the process is inconvenient, takes too much time, and doesn’t easily fit into hectic lives.

Our Theory of Change: Americans have spare time – billions of hours – but in small windows of idle moments: sitting in an airport, waiting in a doctor’s office, riding the bus to work, and more. If we can reach people during these spare moments we harness a huge pool of untapped human energy.

To harness micro spare time we must reach people via mobile, but until recently, mobile phones were limited. The arrival of smartphones like iPhone (with Internet, graphics, camera, GPS, video, audio, and more) created enormous possibilities. 115 million smartphones were sold in 2007 with projections of 700 million by 2012 (WashPost, Aug 2008).

The Extraordinaries is smartphone software that allows millions of volunteers to perform tasks on their smartphones in just a few minutes. We make volunteering feel like a video game to encourage repetition and competition. People login to our system from any place on Earth within cell reception, and constructively use small windows of spare time for science, medicine, nonprofits, government, and more.

Nearly anything you do on a regular computer you can do on a smartphone.

You can help:

-Translate micro-finance loan applications (Kiva).
-Transcribe subtitles for human rights videos (Witness).
-Immigrants improve their English (Phone ESL).
-NASA find craters on the surface of Mars (Clickworkers).
-Cornell University collect data on urban birds (Celebrate Urban Birds).

…Done by everyday people directly on their smartphones during a few moments free. With The Extraordinaries system, small windows of spare time can have a major social impact.

Added Benefit: Our system gets people hooked on social good, and acts as a gateway drug to traditional volunteering.

(Photo Credit: http://www.sxc.hu)

Waiting in line at the grocery store took 23 minutes.

My choices were:

1) Read how Oprah is really an alien in the national enquirer
2) Eat candy
3) Learn how to trim 5 pounds in 5 weeks in cosmopolitan magazine
4) Help an immigrant improve their English through The Extraordinaries

Tough choice.