Green Media Toolshed launched their MediaVolunteer project last week. It’s designed to harness small amounts of volunteer time to keep a detailed national media database up-to-date, by asking them to do small tasks. A volunteer can look up web addresses for media outlets, for instance, verify contact and demographic information, or make calls to determine articles of interest. Check out the site at
www.mediavolunteer.org or read the interesting
Personal Democracy Forum interview with founder Martin Kearns Am I alone in finding this type of tiny task volunteering completely hypnotic? I figured I should go do a task or two to check out the concept… and half an hour later I was still looking up web addresses. As they’ve apparently already roped in nearly 20,000 people to contribute, I suspect I’m not the only one.
Google is doing a similar
experiment with image labeling, which I also find pretty addictive. Over a 90-second period, you and a randomly assigned partner will be shown the same set of images and asked to provide labels for them. When your label matches your partner's label, you move on to the next image until time runs out. Strangely fun, and presumably generates a bunch of decent labels for images.
This is a really interesting and promising model – what else could we apply it to? For better or worse, volunteers are looking to contribute in ways they find meaningful without a huge time commitment. There must be a whole slew of other areas where we could use novice researchers to gather data or apply insight – researching and categorizing software tools? Mapping (through addresses) a huge number of items? Linking up resources into a central place?
