We just launched our first iPhone app: Give Work lets you do tasks in your downtime and help increase the wages of refugees in Kenya working for us.

We have been working with Samasource for a while now — they are a fantastic local non-profit that brings computer based work to people in Africa. We send tasks to one of their hardest to employ groups: a Kenyan refugee camp.

The people are extremely motivated, speak fluent English and even have high speed internet. But sometimes there are downtime issues (due to floods, satellite failure, etc.) and sometimes there are data quality issues (due to cultural misunderstandings), which makes it hard for them to compete for traditional outsourcing work. Fortunately, our dynamic routing and quality control technology can resolve these problems gracefully.

When you complete a task on your iPhone, your work is paired with the work of someone in Kenya.  iPhone users results are used for quality control — if someone waiting for a bus in San Francisco gives the same answer as someone working in a refugee camp, we can be fairly certain that the results are reliable. All of the profits we make on the work collected between the iPhone and the refugees go directly into the pockets of the refugee workers.

How to do tasks
Download the free app from the app store. You can start doing tasks in seconds. Shoot us an email at feedback@crowdflower.com if you have an issues or questions.

How to submit tasks to Samasource and GiveWork
Visit CrowdFlower where you can build tasks to outsource. On the order page, click the “iPhone” and “Samasource” channels.

Thanks!
I want to give a special shoutout to Josh Snyder, who did most of the work of building the actual application. I wasn’t sure we had the resources to get this crazy idea out the door, but everyone pitched in after hours and it looks great!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 13th, 2009 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.