The NGO "Mechanical Turk"

(we discussed this last Monday)

Situation: There are a lot of business travellers flying from city to city and meeting to meeting - and often getting stuck somewhere for maybe 15 minutes or half an hour and nothing to do. That's basically wasted time - and, given that business travellers are often well-trained, its valuable time that's being wasted. We assume that business people would be willing to "donate" this time for a good cause.

Idea: Creating a service that allows those business travellers to complete small but interesting tasks, preferraly for an NGO. The tasks - which could include reviewing and commenting on documents, and maybe some "instant consulting" - would be distributed trough a website similar to Amazons Mechanical Turk. The tasks, which are uploaded by the NGOs, are categorized by subject, NGO and time needed for completion. The website supports Google Gears, which allows users to download tasks and complete them offline. Users could set up a subscription where they specify which kind of tasks they are willing to work on. Once a new task becomes available and the user is online, the information is downloaded automatically to the users laptop.

Business model: None, since it is for a good cause :-)

Problems: Maybe the effort needed to create interesting tasks that can be completed in such short time frames is bigger than the time savings resulting from the "crowdsourcing" of the tasks.