Editor(s)
Shoag, D. and Vidan, A.
Abstract
Humanitarian assistance has been on the global conscience for approximately 70 years (since WWII), and yet in 2010 2.4 billion people still lived on less than $2 per day. As Easterly has pointed out: to see where we went wrong, just look at the incentives. To create true sustainable economic change requires realignment of incentives, particularly the incentive to work and invest. Employment is fundamentally required, and crowd work is the current best hope for providing that employment quickly, with global reach, and at scale. This approach is grassroots, bottom-up, and puts the income directly in the hands of people who need it. Further, it leverages the natural, inherent incentives embodied in capitalism (workers work to create value and get paid, employers want to minimize costs of labor) to shift as much work as possible to the places where it will have the most beneficial impact. We present an analysis of global trends supporting crowdsourcing as a solution, and the results of a pilot project in a rural Kenyan village which demonstrates that this approach is an extremely promising way to meet basic needs to promote economic growth.
Recommended Citation
A. Schriner and D. B. Oerther, "No Really, (Crowd) Work Is the Silver Bullet," Procedia Engineering, vol. 78, pp. 224 - 228, Elsevier Ltd, Sep 2014.
The definitive version is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.proeng.2014.07.060
Meeting Name
Humanitarian Technology: Science, Systems and Global Impact 2014, HumTech2014 (2014: May 13-15, Boston, MA)
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Sponsor(s)
Lockheed Martin Corporation
Keywords and Phrases
Economic Analysis; Economics; Basic Needs; Crowdsourcing; Economic Growths; Global Trends; Humanitarian Assistances; Pilot Projects; Poverty; Sustainable Economics; Employment
Geographic Coverage
Kamuga, Kenya
International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)
1877-7058
Electronic OCLC #
489540196
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
Document Version
Final Version
File Type
text
Language(s)
English
Rights
© 2014 Elsevier Ltd, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Publication Date
01 Sep 2014
