iTunes

Our friends Leila Chirayath Janah and Alex Molloy at Samasource.org -- members of our growing Liberation Technology blog community -- write to tell us about the great progress they're making. As Leila notes, finding decent work is one of the biggest problems confronting many of the world's poor. Samasource tries to improve the lives of women, youth, and refugees living in poverty by connecting them via the Internet to "microwork" opportunities -- small tasks that pay a few cents. By providing work through crowdsourcing platforms like Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower, Samasource links people who need jobs with contracts from Silicon Valley companies. Samasource operates using long distance WiFi access point solutions in rural areas and refugee camps in Africa and Asia and has just expanded into Haiti via a partnership with 1,000Jobs/Haiti, an affiliate of Partners in Health. Their work is highlighted in the TED talk shown below. If you are an iPhone/iPad user, you can support this effort via the GiveWork iTunes link, an app developed with CrowdFlower that allows users to donate their time to charity by double checking the work done by Samasource workers.