From The San Francisco Chronicle
Networks direct volunteers to micro gigs
By Alejandro Martínez-Cabrera
The idea is relatively simple: If you have a few minutes to spare, you can help make a difference.
A person's five minutes may not be enough to save the world, but when an army of volunteers embrace this mantra, the potential for good can be enormous.
That's the vision behind the Extraordinaries, one of a handful of services that are applying the concept of crowdsourcing - tapping into the masses to find solutions for complex problems - to philanthropic and charitable causes....
What's more, the Extraordinaries and other platforms that use crowdsourcing principles are experiments in using technology to effectively engage people and channel their interests into a cause, said Coye Cheshire, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley's School of Information.
"The technology provides one of most important aspects of any collective effort," he said. "The designers of these systems are providing a kind of scaffolding that reduces barriers to entry. This is the kind of stuff that researchers have been looking at for decades."