Labeling images with a computer game
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
txteagle: Mobile Crowdsourcing
IDGD '09 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Internationalization, Design and Global Development: Held as Part of HCI International 2009
ViralVCD: tracing information-diffusion paths with low cost media in developing communities
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Who are the crowdworkers?: shifting demographics in mechanical turk
CHI '10 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Evaluating and improving the usability of Mechanical Turk for low-income workers in India
Proceedings of the First ACM Symposium on Computing for Development
A Benchmark Kannada Handwritten Document Dataset and Its Segmentation
ICDAR '11 Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
Paying in kind for crowdsourced work in developing regions
Pervasive'12 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Pervasive Computing
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Micro-volunteering: helping the helpers in development
Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work companion
Wally: crowd powered image matching on tablets
Proceedings of the First International Workshop on Crowdsourcing and Data Mining
Powering the cellphone revolution: findings from mobile phone charging trials in off-grid Kenya
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Hustling online: understanding consolidated facebook use in an informal settlement in Nairobi
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM international joint conference on Pervasive and ubiquitous computing
| Hi-index | 0.01 |
Global crowdsourcing platforms could offer new employment opportunities to low-income workers in developing countries. However, the impact to date has been limited because poor communities usually lack access to computers and the Internet. This paper presents mClerk, a new platform for mobile crowdsourcing in developing regions. mClerk sends and receives tasks via SMS, making it accessible to anyone with a low-end mobile phone. However, mClerk is not limited to text: it leverages a little-known protocol to send small images via ordinary SMS, enabling novel distribution of graphical tasks. Via a 5-week deployment in semi-urban India, we demonstrate that mClerk is effective for digitizing local-language documents. Usage of mClerk spread virally from 10 users to 239 users, who digitized over 25,000 words during the study. We discuss the social ecosystem surrounding this usage, and evaluate the potential of mobile crowdsourcing to both deliver and derive value from users in developing regions.