This is an excellent blog post that I couldn’t help but write about. In “From Netsourcing to Crowdsourcing to Turksourcing Crisis Information” @patrickmeier uses the example of Ushahidi and asks the proverbial question,

“How do we move from netsourcing to crowdsourcing and on to turksourcing?”

In his post, Patrick Meier talks about how Ushahidi was able to netsource out the roles of volunteers for both the Haiti and Chile disasters to Fletcher/Tufts, SIPA/Columbia and the Graduate Institute in Geneva. These networks were closely-knit related groups of people connected by social networks of universities. In other words, definitely not an anonymous crowd but a refined crowd who were related by academic interests. As he stated, “Netsourcing presents some important advantages. Pre-existing social ties can help mobilize a trusted volunteer network.” This was an example of netsourcing at its best. Quick mobilization.

The problem with netsourcing is that it is basically “bounded crowdsourcing” and is “sale-constrained” (words of @patrickmeier). Netsourcing works, but on levels that cannot grow beyond their own closely bounded social networks. Growing beyond those closely knit social networks to a larger crowdsourcing effort of anonymous volunteers is the next step to higher participation and more data.

As Patrick Meier asks, “How do we move from having 300 volunteers connected via existing social networks to 300,000 or even 3,000,000 anonymous volunteers?” This is a great question.

I think an equally important question to ask is, what kind of metrics do we use to choose which method of sourcing works best for the given situation? Some efforts might be better off using localized netsourcing, while other larger efforts might require us to move more into crowdsourcing instead of localized netsourcing. I think it’s a matter of using the right tool for the job (while I don’t have any examples that come to mind).

To take matters one step further, how do we move from crowdsourcing to turksourcing? I think that’s the first time I heard that word before, but it would involve a hybrid combination of Amazon Mechanical Turk with Swift River. Turksourcing moves into the territory of making small tasks easy, cheap, but with enough incentive to get a return on investment (aka data). The main challenge is likely how to build incentive into existing applications and efforts (such as mobile gaming). Gaming might just be the beginning, but I would venture to ask if it were possible to bring CrowdFlower and Samasource into the fold and expand into other areas? How about a WordPress widget that allows visitors to easily complete a task as they read a blog post? Or, as Maarten commented on iRevolution, starting with Facebook? That seems to be the go-to place to launch an effort of this magnitude.

This is just the beginning of a new model of not only crowdsourcing for Ushahidi-related crisis reporting, but also into other modes of employing refugees, such as what Samasource is doing, and other unemployed people around the world who have access to either mobile or computing technologies. The end result is creating opportunity that is accessible but also fulfills a social good. This will most definitely be a space to watch in the coming year as opportunity becomes more accessible to others who have no opportunity.