Samasourcing

When our ad ran on Hulu in late November, we got a couple of emails from people that thought our work deprives Americans of opportunity. Some used very strong language:

from Joe ****** <joe***@verizon.net> to info@samasource.org date Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 7:00 PM subject Your company mailing list <info.samasource.org> Filter messages from this mailing list

hide details Nov 22

I am about sick and tired of hearing about all these companies like yours that take work that could help our country and take it away from us to give to other countries.  The USA is falling apart because of egotistical, money hungry assholes that care more about finding ways to make more money no matter what it does to the rest of us!  So as far as I'm concerned bring the work to us or keep your ads off of our AMERICAN television systems!

 

Reply

 

leila*****@gmail.com ✆  to Joe, info

show details Nov 22

 

Dear Joe,
We are a nonprofit helping the poorest people in the world, including low-income entrepreneurs in the US. If you'd like to engage in a constructive dialogue about how we could help more Americans, please let us know -- we'd be happy to.
Best wishes,
Leila

 

Reply

 

Joe *******  to me

show details Nov 25

 I live in Ohio which has one of, if not the highest unemployment rate in the country.  I have been looking for work unsuccessfully for over a year.  There is an old K-Mart building in my town that would be perfect to renovate into a building that would suit the needs of your company perfectly, which would in turn provide many jobs for my area.  If there is anything you could do to get this going, it would be greatly appreciated!  I appologize for my previous e-mail, but I hope you can understand the reasoning behind it.

Thanks
Joe ******

When arriving in Nairobi, one can quickly feel stifled by people, noise, pollution, so the charm of the city is not obvious at first. This city is like a whirlwind that can be stunning. But after the first shockwave, one gets used to this environment and appreciates the kind of life Nairobi has to offer.

I have been working as a Samasource fellow for one month now; it has been an experience which can be described as a journey of discovery, adaptation, meeting and sharing. Discovering the lifestyle here, adapting to the time and skills, meeting welcoming partners and talented workers, sharing of ideas and skills.

My initial task as a Fellow was to populate a new online database for Samasource for their website. This site now has the profiles of potential employees which allows new and existing clients to get a better feel of the knowledge, expertise and circumstance/aspirations of people they work with. My task was to compile a profile for every worker who participated in a Samasource project. Once the profiles were reviewed and the photos available I uploaded them onto the Samasource website. They are available on: www.samasource.org/impact.

This is great way to literally “put a face to a name” and to connect the workers with employers. It allows one to forget about the distance and understand Samasource’s goals by linking workers to jobs.

In visiting all the Service Partners and people, I learned how Samasource has given not only a “hand-up” but in fact provided life changing opportunity to workers. One of the workers I met was single mother who could not provide for her two children. Samasource, working with the service provider, has helped her to become independent and take care of her livelihood.

I met all kinds of people during this project, most of them are young and educated, went to or are actually at university in various sectors such as Hotel Management, Information and Technology, International Business, etc. All workers seem really motivated, talented and open minded. The service partners in Nairobi always provided a warm welcomed and I had really interesting discussions with some workers about various subjects as life, work, and the impact of Samasource projects.

Daproim (daproim.com) one of Samasource partners, provided me with office space during this project as well as Internet access. Steve, the president of the company, is an enthusiastic young entrepreneur who wants every employee to be treated with respect. He is interested in various training projects aimed at distressed people. Daproim, like some other Samasource partners, offers part-time work to local university students and facilities for disabled workers. Daproim started in 2006 with four employees, today it has already around 10. The plan is to grow to 20 or 30 people in the next years.

Steve is supporting a Cisco training center a few kilometers away from Nairobi. There, young women, often single mothers, are trained to do data entry and transcription tasks. This training is subsidized by an NGO. These women really want to succeed, and you can see in their eyes their thirst for knowledge. Steve feeds their motivation, while acknowledging that he needs to connect these women with jobs. There is no doubt that future difficulties lay ahead. The notion of hard work is on everyone’s lips, as there are no other means to succeed and the only way for them to benefit from a better life. Thus people are totally ready to offer their best.

So as I get used to the hustle and bustle of the city and plan my visits to the different service partners I feel good about lending a hand. I have to say that in my month of working as a Fellow for Samasource and helping create the Profiles database I too have learned the value of hard work! In my next blog I will write more about a typical work day for me in Nairobi.

Things are picking up for us. After a year of slaving away, living on friends' futons, etc., Samasource has generated a quarter of a million dollars in work benefitting 550 people in seven countries. We just did our numbers for our end-of-year board meeting, and it's astonishing. Just over a year ago, our website was a Wordpress blog and we'd signed one contract for $30K.

I attribute any success we've had to scrappiness. For-profit startups tend to have this quality in abundance. Starting up in a garage and living on ramen is part of the founding story of the biggest tech companies in the world (read Founders at Work if you don't know what I mean).

A while ago I wrote a post on useful tools for social entrepreneurs, but I think that scrappiness is less about what tools you use and more about your mindset.

Last month at TEDIndia, one of the other fellows mentioned a Hindi word that captures this concept perfectly: Jugaad. Simply put, Jugaad means resourcefulness, or doing more with less, MacGyver-style.

जुगाड़

Jugaadists (apologies to Hindi speakers) make startups happen, and if you can retain them, they help keep more established businesses nimble and creative. Jugaad is a big part of our culture at Samasource.

Finally, after 18 cities in 30 days (from Ixtapa to Coimbatore, and everywhere in between), I'm back to the daily grind. And this blog.

Here's a pearl if you haven't read it already: Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely. Ariely, a behavioral economist, enlightens readers about everything from absurd CEO compensation (they make 369x what workers make, up threefold from what it used to be a decade ago) to why we shouldn't trust teenagers to use condoms in the heat of the moment.

The parts most useful to social entrepreneurs are a couple of chapters in the middle, where Ariely describes how market norms (the kind that make you pay for stuff) differ from social norms (the kind that make you want to do stuff for free). It helped me understand how we were able to pull off our Gala last week with an all-volunteer staff, and how nonprofits can score great employees from the for-profit sector if we focus on our competitive advantage (doing good, even if it's for far less pay).

There's also great advice on how to build a good company (make people feel valued and appeal to social norms, not just market norms) and how to stop procrastinating. I'm still working on the latter.

Lakshmi Prathury and Chris Anderson kick things off with a moving reading of Tagore's Mind Without Fear.

Hans Rosling predicts (with the energy of a sportscaster at the top of his game) that average income in India and China will catch up with the US and UK on July 27, 2048!

Just posted this as a response to a note on ReadWriteWeb that our partner CrowdFlower is exploiting children by embedding tasks within social games on sites like Facebook. A lot of the issues raised are similar to concerns we've heard earlier, so I'm posting my response:

---

I'm the Founder of Samasource, a nonprofit that uses CrowdFlower's technology to connect extremely marginalized people, including refugees in Africa, to digital work. We were accused of creating "virtual sweatshops" a few weeks ago, which made me think really deeply about our model and the ethics of sending this kind of work to marginalized people. (While our workers aren't children, they aren't able to do many other types of work due to their location or status as refugees, making them vulnerable to exploitation.) 

 So here are my thoughts. It's worth noting that our perspective on this is independent of financial incentive; owners of a nonprofit don't get equity, and 90% of the income from the work we perform goes directly to workers. 

For something to be truly exploitive, it has to deny people choice. That can happen in two ways: either people are forced or coerced to do something, or they are incapable of making a choice because they're very young, very old, or mentally handicapped. The key thing about CrowdFlower's model is that it's based on choice, rather than coercion. Workers do tasks because they earn money and because the tasks only take a few minutes. It's also built to optimize worker performance and weed out people who do a bad job. It's hard to get accurate results from people who are coerced into doing work. 

From our perspective, this kind of "microwork" is fantastic for our beneficiaries who face grim alternatives for earning a living, like toiling under the sun on a field or in a quarry (those aren't made up -- many of our workers have done those things before to get by.) 

It's also nice for our beneficiaries that these tasks can be done virtually anywhere, at any time. CrowdFlower frees workers from 9-5 monotony by making it easy for them to log in and work when they want to. With Gambit, they're placing these tasks in all sorts of unlikely places that make them become less burdensome and more fun to do. Social games are one example of that. The iPhone app we launched with CrowdFlower (called Give Work) is another. 

The fact that children might be doing tasks as part of a game doesn't bother me in the least. If kids are savvy enough to hold their own in an online game, they're certainly capable of making choices about how they wish to spend their time. 

Child labor laws are designed to protect children from being exploited. In the countries where we work, children are made to skip school and weave rugs, work in brothels, or plow fields. It seems a little silly to put completing a few tasks as part of an online game experience in that category.

This morning at  Opportunity Collaboration, Alvaro Rodriguez Arregui (Board Chairman of the highly profitable microfinance institution Compartamos Banco, in Mexico), made a bold statement: 

Microfinance doesn't help the poorest of the poor. Furthermore, it doesn't necessarily contribute to economic development. 

With interest rates of 73 percent (compared to the Mexican average of 100 percent), investment returns of 40 percent, and 1.5 million borrowers, Compartamos is a highly scalable commercial model for microfinance. But it might not turn out to be a highly scalable model for ending poverty, as so many have claimed, because the people who receive microloans are not the poorest of the poor.

Arregui noted that the Poverty Action Lab at MIT has just started a 3-year randomized, controlled trial of the impact of loans from Compartamos on three communities in Mexico, so we might have better answers soon. 

After many sleepless nights, we're launching Give Work today with our partner CrowdFlower (get it here). 

Give Work is an iPhone app that lets you earn money for refugees in Dadaab, Kenya in your spare time. Here's how it works:

1. Download the app

2. Do a task, such categorizing an image, judging a sentence, or something else that takes a minute or two

3. A refugee that has been trained does the same task

4. Once the task has been completed, a refugee gets paid for the work you both collaborated on.

Pretty nifty! Help us out by downloading the app and telling us what you think.

Turns out "as much as possible" means once in 2 weeks, but here are some highlights:

Meeting Craig Newmark, of Craigslist fame, at the African Social Enterprise Forum. Craig said he hates doing anything but customer service, answers 150K emails a month, and views Craigslist as a public good. Despite what Wired wrote last month, I heart Craig.

Managing to miss four African presidents speak at the US-Africa business summit, but scoring a free ragball at the soccer demo (World Cup 2010!)

Talking with Dean Kamen, rockstar Segway inventor, about his low-cost power solution that runs entirely on cow dung and costs $2K

Running into a big brown bear in the Eastern Sierras, where I'm (!) snowed in with a bunch of social entrepreneurs at the Rainer Arnhold Fellows retreat.

Also I'm reading 4 really good books right now, which are on the to-do list to write up for readers of Samasourcing...

All coach class + couches and putting my much-abused MacBook through the ringer.

I'll try to blog as much as possible with funny anecdotes from the following:

September 26: African Social Enterprise Forum - props for using Weebly [NY]

September 29-Oct 1: Corporate Council on Africa US-Africa Business Summit [DC]

Oct 1-3: MIT Legatum Center Annual Conference [Boston]

Oct 3-10: Rainer Arnhold Fellows [Somewhere outside Reno]

In the meantime, follow me or Samasource on Twitter for updates!

Great post on the Sama blog from our own Jess McCarter on software pricing for nonprofits. When the marginal cost of a producing something is 0 or near 0 (as in the case of software, pills, and information), differential pricing is the only ethical option. Right?

Here's an excerpt from the post (full story here):

A hard working not for profit (NFP) has something in common with a successful for profit company – they both aggressively look at every item of the budget to make sure they stay in the black. Of course, after that things diverge. Regular companies invest in tools to increase the bottom line and NFPs seeks to save as much of their capital as possible so they have enough left for the expenses that directly impact the community they are trying to serve.

One of the things I do to attack the bottom line is to politely ask the companies whose software products we use if they would be willing to donate a license to, or at least offer a discount on a license to Samasource. Some of these products are really expensive and some of them are really reasonably priced. But what does “reasonably priced” mean to a NFP? You see we think about things slightly differently. For me $20 is a wire transfer of payment to Cameroon or a sliver of a training program for 10 new potential Samasource workers trying to make a dignified digital living.

Of course, that’s what I care about. Other companies have different priorities. I get it. It’s just that when you ask everyone whose products you use you get a wide variety of responses. Some people are really cool, like Dropbox (http://www.getdropbox.com). They have a file syncing program that works through a web app and desktop clients for Windows and Mac. The free version is 2 GB and that was fine till we started making a video ad for Hulu (also donated, thanks Hulu.com!). I wrote, they got right back to me and bumped us to 10 GB of shared storage.

Some of the other tools we use we were able to purchase at a large discount thanks to Techsoup. Their NFP version of Adobe Creative Suite was something we could justify as it is a great tool for illustrating the stories of our service partners on the website and in print materials. Also it was a LARGE discount on a very expensive piece of software. Thanks Techsoup and Adobe! It would have been better if it was free. Did I mention we don’t use this tool to make a profit but rather to help people who live in extreme poverty work their way to a livelihood?

Of course some people say no. That’s cool, they have other things going on, maybe they don’t care about our mission or don’t even have a charitable giving program. Not every for profit business has the time, the budget, the desire or the motivation to donate. More power to them and I hope they rock their bottom line.

And then there are just jerks. A great example is 37 Signals. They make money building amazing tools for other people to make money with – project management, CRM, and other software products largely used by businesses. And what did they say when I asked if they had a donation or discount program?

“We… believe everyone is entitled to the best price we can offer, from the small businessperson who’s barely squeaking by to the non-profit to the big corporation. That’s why the published prices are the only prices we offer.”

Wow. I respect a good honest no, but to suggest that the reason they don’t offer a NFP discount is that they sell Basecamp, et al for best price they can offer to anyone, anywhere and anytime? I have no knowledge of their marginal costs or balance sheets, I am just going out on a limb to suggest that they just don’t want to donate. I would even respect a “No, and you are a big bozo for even asking.” I get that sometimes. Maybe I am a bozo. I thought it doesn’t hurt to ask.

Our amazing mentors have told us again and again you have to ask. And we will continue to do so. Feel free to say no. But I’d appreciate it if you said yes.

I swear I'll get back to book recommendations. In the meantime, I thought I'd share some thoughts and pics from our demo booth at TechCrunch 50 yesterday. Here's what our booth looked like (the woman on the left is Silvia Console Battilana, founder of Auctionomics and our Samasource Gala co-chair):

A lot of people came up and said "What are you doing here? What could a nonprofit get out of a technology conference?" For one thing, it's sort of silly to lump all nonprofits into one sector: we're a technology company that happens to be structured as a social business. So it makes a lot of sense for us to be at conferences with other technology companies, rather than with, say, nonprofit animal shelters.

Also, being a lone nonprofit in a sea of VC-backed startups makes people want to help you. In just two days, our head of sales got tons of new leads for our workers. One of our partners, CrowdFlower, even mentioned us on the main stage as a source of workers for his task-completion engine.

Oh, and on being a girl: there were only about 4 women in the demo pit (many of them founders), but people kept assuming that we were hired "booth babes." That was fun.

Bengali economist Amartya Sen won a Nobel Prize for his work on development theory; this book should be required reading for any social entrepreneur. In Development as Freedom, Sen expertly stitches together the strands of moral philosophy (particularly Rawl's work on justice), economics, and psychology that pertain to human development. He examines different ways of evaluating development, from simple income indicators to more complex measurements such as political freedom, and introduces capability theory (capabilities are substantive human freedoms, such as political rights). 

Sen makes a convincing argument that human agency is the most important aspect of development. On Saturday, at Japan's Social Entrepreneur Gathering in Tokyo, Kiva co-founder Matt Flannery echoed this sentiment: "Low income people around the world want to be seen as equal partners in a business relationship, not poor recipients of aid."

The Samasource tagline "give work" draws on Sen's theory as well -- we were founded on the idea that development should be a leveler of opportunity and freedom, not an instrument for simple gains in material wealth. 

That's the question we posed when Samasource applied for Facebook Fund, a venture-backed fund to support the most promising applications on the Facebook platform. We won a spot among 19 other companies (and one non-profit) earlier this summer. 

[Sorry again, readers who were hoping for another book. I'll resume those soon, I promise!]

So how does Facebook help Samasource workers? We had an idea a few months ago: what if we could get our workers into the lucrative market of QA testing for software developers? We realized we could discretize the work of doing quality assurance and basic functionality testing on Facebook applications, creating a new type of microwork (simple, web-based computer tasks) to serve a growing number of developers in need of testers. Here's what it looks like:

Our app launches today at fbFund Demo Day today. Check it out on Facebook here or read about the app here.

I'm interrupting my regularly scheduled programming (7 Books for Social Entrepreneurs will be continued next week) to discuss a really interesting new take on Samasource's work. Last week, I participated in a Crowdsourcing for Good (twitter: #c4g) panel with Jacob and John, founders of The Extraordinaries and EduFire. 

I spoke about our Refugee Work Program, which links refugees in Dadaab, Kenya with small, paying tasks like the kind that get posted to sites like Amazon's Mechanical Turk. (To give you an example of what the work entails, one of the tasks involved finding email addresses on company websites and returning them in a web form.)

I had an interesting thought: what if microwork is a complement to microfinance? One challenge to microfinance is that there's a natural ceiling to how much money people can make from small businesses that serve local needs (e.g., a small chicken farm), while microwork leads to all sorts of skills that have broader applications and can serve global needs (such as virtual assistance, which Samasource workers now perform for clients from Silicon Valley to London).

Mechanical Turk-type "human intelligence tasks" represent the most discretized units of digital work -- probably the equivalent of a factory floor job. While they aren't that intellectually interesting, what's good about this type of work is that it gets people online and skilled at using computers, which in turn gets them onto the same social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc) as everyone else and allows them to build their online reputations -- vital to having a voice in the modern world.

Just take a look at this exchange that happened on my Facebook wall last week. Paul Parach, a refugee I blogged about in an earlier post, found his way onto Facebook and into a conversation with my high school friend from LA via my wall:

Microwork can change lives. I'll bet that in a few years, it will gain traction as a global phenomenon that empowers the poor who aren't well served by microfinance andd other poverty reduction programs.

Ben Franklin was, I'm convinced, America's first social entrepreneur. In his 84 years, he developed the first volunteer fire brigade, lending library, and intellectual society, and helped found the University of Pennsylvania and one of the nation's earliest major newspapers. And in his spare time, he invented the glass armonica (a musical instrument that uses spinning glass discs to produce sound), the lightening rod, bifocals, and a type of stove that reduces indoor fumes.

This biography of Franklin by Walter Isaacson (CEO of the Aspen Institute and former CEO of CNN) is a surprisingly enjoyable read. Some of the lessons for social entrepreneurs include Franklin's "plan for future conduct," written when he was 20 and full of self-help advice, and inspiring quotes. My favorite is something he said to his son, who was more  concerned with making a lot of money than doing hands-on work:  "Why not become a joiner or wheelwright, if the estate I leave you is not enough? The man who lives by his labor is at least free."

The curious may also want to check out his schedule, which I posted to my blog a few weeks ago (via Maira Kalman at the NYT).

"I believe in free markets as sources of inspiration and freedom for all, not as architects of decadence for a small elite." -- Muhammad Yunus

In Creating a World Without Poverty, Muhammad Yunus (Founder of Grameen Bank and Winner of the Nobel Peace Prize) spells out his vision for social business, which differs considerably from the kind of profit-maximizing business (PMBs) most of us know from Econ 101. His definition for a social business is simple: social businesses are non-loss, non-dividend companies that exist primarily to solve a social problem.

This is revolutionary stuff. "Non-loss" means that social businesses are not charities; they are not dependent on the whims of donors to succeed, and they must serve a need that is validated by the market. In social business, the end consumer is also a beneficiary (whereas in most charities, beneficiaries are not thought of as consumers, which leads to inferior service quality and a lot of products and services that no one wants). "Non-loss" is a clear counter to "for-profit," the mantra that defines PMBs and relies on outmoded conceptions of human nature and self-interest.

"Non-dividend" means that the business is freed from the burden of paying out shareholders (and from shareholders' interests, which can differ substantially from workers' interests). Social businesses are set up such that the people who do the work, and their customers, are the people who reap the benefits.

Best of all, Creating a World Without Poverty is packed with real lessons for people running social businesses. Yunus gives helpful charts of the Grameen family of enterprises, details Grameen's relationship with Danone to provide fortified yogurt in Bangladesh, and describes the transformative power of IT in the social business sector. This book is a must-read.

Tune in next week for Volume 3!

With the help of friends and advisors, I've collected seven great books for people who want to change the world through social business. I'll review each one for the next seven weeks and post them here to Samasourcing and at leilac.com.

Volume One: Founders at Work

This is one of those books you wish you'd read in high school. It's a collection of interviews of tech startup founders, edited by Y Combinator co-founder Jessica Livingston. While a lot of those profiled sold their for-profit companies for millions of dollars, there are tons of useful lessons for founders of social businesses. Here are a couple of my favorites:

"The hardest part in a startup is that you wake up one morning and you feel great about the day, and you think, 'we're kicking ass.' And then you wake up the next morning and you think, 'we're dead.' And literally nothing's changed...the thing is, you never know." (Joe Kraus, founder of Excite, JotSpot, and DigitalConsumer.org)

"We weren't trying to strike it rich with Firefox...it's open source and it's free. If you can afford to do things that way, it's just so much better. You're not thinking about venture capitalists or marketing or sales. Just product and users, all day, every day." (Blake Ross, one of the developers behind Firefox, funded by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation).

Buy this book now; it's one of the most useful things I've ever read.