Filed under: web 2.0
You know Amazon's Mechanical Turk? It's one of the more interesting services online: Take people and assign them microscopic tasks. They simply do the tasks and make money, and you get your tasks done. They're not your employees, and you don't even really know who they are. It's all very impersonal - an "on-demand, scalable workforce".
Sparked takes that same approach and applies it to charity work. We all like to help -- and we all have causes we believe in. But most people don't have time to volunteer for many hours every week, or aren't able to commute to volunteer, etc. That's exactly what Sparked solves. As a volunteer, you're asked what are your areas of interest. Not specific charities, but just general areas - think "food, animals, poverty."
You're then asked to specify what you can do. There are only a few categories, all related to things you can do right from home, such as fundraising, IT work, social media work, etc. This is what you see in the screenshot above.
Only then does the service ask who exactly you are, by having you create an account (or logging in with Facebook). Once all that is done, you start getting small tasks from charities in the fields you've indicated. Each task is supposed to take just a few minutes - kind of like "your good deed for the day".
The site is very well-designed, and the usability aspect is unique. They've actually figured out a way to quickly collect a bunch of information (your interests and skills) without having you fill out an irritating form. All in all, a worthy social experiment.
Sparked lets you harness your free time for a good cause originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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