Slacktivism and Data Hygiene
I’ve been nodding along with both sides of the ‘slactivism’ debate for a few months. Is it a good thing to give people small, low (but not zero) impact opportunities to help out causes? Do micro-donations and micro-volunteering discourage later, more significant engagement? Well, either nobody knows for sure, or nobody has measured it, or they have measured and haven’t published their findings, or my search for the findings has been inadequate.
But I did have an idea that I thought was a good idea, and here it is. Why not use the capacity in systems like The Extraordinaries, Mechanical Turk, TxtEagle, CrowdFlower, and hell, Twitter and Facebook, Aardvark, Hunch, and other systems to help solve another long standing problem: Data hygiene.
If you read a random smattering of volunteer opportunities and donation pitches sourced from databases or APIs like Volunteer Match, Social Actions, and All For Good, you realize quickly that many of them are just…. bad. Out of date, inaccurate, lacking in detail, too long, not long enough, poorly written, missing fields, or perhaps in a language you don’t understand. Or, hey, if you’ve ever been eyeball deep in a nonprofit CRM database, you know scary the duplicates, misspellings, and other data bugs can be. It would require an immense amount of minor but repetitive human review to improve. Can’t micro-volunteering and slacktivism help with that?
I realize that slacktivists may still want to feel like they are doing something more primary to the cause – educate a child, house a homeless pet, provide a meal. It may be too abstract to ask someone to “proofread and provide feedback on this other virtual volunteering opportunity as your virtual volunteering opportunity.” Then again, open maps, open location databases, and other community resources have continued to spring up and gain traction. Wikipedia was built with this model. One person’s boring and irrelevant Wiki editing task is another person’s unrequited Ph.D. research, or favorite street, or method of helping a friend. How do we get the right microtasks to the right people?
So it’s clear that crowdsourced databases exist and they are growing. But I think that there are more avenues (haha, semi-intentional pun) for using this technique. It’s not just geolocation, it’s not just encyclopedias: Everything for the public good that can be improved iteratively by the public should be. I think more could be done to plug in the existing needs for slacktivism into the existing tools for slacktivism. I think more could be done to make the person : task matching smarter.
Perhaps more simply, is anyone using crowdsourcing or slacktivism to improve aggregated donation and volunteer opportunities? What do you think? Of which efforts are we not yet aware?
