Haverhill Mayor: Report Potholes, Win Prizes, Improve Your Community

Image © 2013 David Joles, Star Tribune

Sometimes it’s good to remember that crowdsourcing efforts don’t always have to be huge, world-sweeping events that change the very nature of how our society functions. Sometimes, crowdsourcing just provides us with a neat way to improve the immediate world around us, and that’s exactly what’s happening right now in a town in Massachusetts.

James Fiorentini, the mayor of Haverhill, MA, has recently put out the call to the residents of his town: find potholes for us to fix, and get a chance to win one of three $25 gift certificates from local businesses. It’s a win/win/win proposition; the contest winners get free services and merchandise, the residents of the town get better roads, and the mayor can spend resources on fixing potholes instead of locating them. In his announcement, the mayor stated that he intends to fix all of the reported potholes within two business days of when they are discovered.

I personally think this is just swell. Potholes are a huge annoyance to anyone who uses a wheeled vehicle to navigate roads, and there is no shortage of people who are angry enough about them to report them. While some residents have correctly identified this to be the job of the Department of Public Works, I would image that it is difficult for that group to be prolific enough to locate every pothole by themselves. By recruiting regular citizens, they essentially get watchdogs on every street in every neighborhood. The added bonus of a specific phone number and email address to send these reports means they can all be grouped together instead of potentially getting lost in the shuffle of bureaucracy.

This project is also three-for-three on successful crowdsourcing tenets. There is a joint incentive for those participating; they get the guaranteed improvement of their neighborhoods and a change at some free local swag. Like successful campaigns before them, this one gives an outlet to those who were desperately trying to have their concerns heard and met. The barrier of entry is appropriately low, and the inclusion of both a dedicated phone number and email address for reports means that even technologically-impaired residents can participate. And the compartmentalization is about as straightforward as you can get; it doesn’t get much clearer than “tell us where the potholes are.”

Interestingly, some citizens are less-than-pleased at this announcement. The comments section for the initial announcement contains many who would like to see the DPW be a little more dedicated to their jobs, eliminating the need for citizen reports in the first place. I addressed this concern above, but the local commentariat has additional complaints that I think are a little more well-founded. Mainly, they think that the prizes offered are either insufficient or downright insulting. Some would rather see the money go towards repairing vehicles that have already been damaged by potholes, and others feel that the combined $75 total of prize value is a mere distraction from the fact that citizens are being asked to cover the perceived failures of their local government.

As an outsider to the intricacies of Haverhill political intrigue, my opinion of this story as a whole is generally positive. I would jump at the opportunity to similarly improve my own residential area, and seeing public officials at least attempt to connect with their constituents is heartwarming even if the execution is less than over-the-top. I hope this story gets some traction and other cities offer similar services in the future. It would make all of our rides a little smoother.

PucaTrade is a Collaborative Way To Trade Magic Cards

Image © 2013 PucaTrade

It’s been well-established by this point that I am a fan of Magic: The Gathering. There’s just something about shuffling up your deck and launching a barrage of monsters, weapons, and sorcery at an opponent’s tender, innocent face. The only downside is that the cards themselves, the fundamental building blocks of the entire game, are not cheap. It’s not uncommon to see highly-played cards for some formats valued at $100 each.

PucaTrade.com aims to change the game by making the process of trading cards between players crazy simple, and it’s doing it through crowdsourcing. The driving concept is that of Collaborative Consumption, where people share things they own instead of maintaining permanent ownership. Zipcar has used this concept to great success with their car-sharing service, and PucaTrade extends the concept to Magic cards.

With PucaTrade, users mail out cards they own that other users also happen to want. In return, they receive some amount of “PucaPoints”, which in turn can be spent on cards the user wants. It’s dead simple, and PucaTrade plays fair by keeping a constant eye on card values and making sure no users are getting ripped off by uneven trades. In another act of crowdsourcing, the site developers have teamed up with the users to create PucaBot. The site-owned “user” identifies and buys surplus cards in order to even out the economy and make a little money to keep the site running.

It’s a solid concept. People who play Magic often have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of unplayed and unwanted cards in their collections that would be better off in the hands of someone who’d actually appreciate them. PucaTrade also circumvents the entire economy of online card shopping, where prices can vary drastically and shipping snafus can prevent cards from arriving for days. With PucaTrade, the grassroots approach means its users can send and receive a steady stream of cards to each other at no cost except postage. Brilliant.

PucaTrade is growing quickly, and has already traded over $80,000 worth of cards between its users. They are currently doing an Indiegogo project to get out of beta and add some really great features to the site, including a redesigned interface and more tools for user interaction. If you’re as into Magic as I am, or if you just think these cards are getting crazy stupid expensive, donate to the campaign and/or register on the website and start trading. You get free PucaPoints if you share the campaign on Facebook or Twitter, too!

Casey Armstrong: Saving The World, Going Open-Source, Turning People Into Robots

Casey Armstrong has been a busy man. Formerly the content director at Daily Crowdsource, Armstrong has recently founded his own company, VineStove. A crowd labor/ microtasking site at heart, VineStove’s general essence is similar to that of Amazon Mechanical Turk, ShortTask, or Fiverr. People post jobs or tasks for others to carry out, and pay them a small amount for doing so. These are tasks that can typically be completed in the ballpark of five minutes; example tasks on VineStove’s homepage include photoshopping an image or researching payment plans.

The thing that sets VineStove apart from those sites, however, is the fact that all the work is done on a strictly volunteer basis. Payment is still rendered, but instead of going to the person doing the work, it’s donated to a charity or nonprofit organization of the worker’s choice. And according to Armstrong, the companies are “doing some pretty cool things. I just added the SENS Foundation, for example; they work on longevity research. Channeling money to them means we all get to live a little longer!”

Casey’s Gift To The World

There’s another layer to Armstrong’s world-saving scheme. In addition to providing labor and funding for these foundations, he intends to eventually make VineStove open-source, allowing anyone with adequate interest to have access to the entirety of code he uses to run his site.

“The end game for me is really the open-source project,” Armstrong affirms. “I want to see microtasking get big and mature faster. I am addicted to sites like mTurk and Quora,  and microvolunteering sites like Sparked; I want microtasking to become a part of everything, really.”

He sees the open-source release of VineStove to be an important step in the process. “It might seem like a gutsy move, but I firmly believe that a crowdsourcing platform is about what you put into it, and not its clever construction or web development. I had struggled to build a microtasking site for years. It took me a lot of effort to learn web development, research my options, and plan it all out… I wish VineStove could have gone up in three clicks years ago.”

By releasing VineStove’s source code to the public, Armstrong’s intention is that anyone with a reasonable amount of dedication will be able to build a platform to serve their purposes, with minimal technical knowledge required. Like a true altruist, he hopes to render the hardships that he himself encountered in building his platform obsolete.

Right, But What’s This About Turning Folks Into Robots?

Getting a site ready to go open-source isn’t an easy task. It takes money, and for a small team like Armstrong’s, a certain amount of extra hands. And oddly enough, the solution to those problems can be found in the form of a crowdfunded robotic intern.

I discussed crowdfunding a little bit last week; it’s the process of soliciting funding for a project from good-hearted denizens of the Internet instead of trying to get a big corporation or fatcat to bankroll the whole thing. Armstrong’s current project on RocketHub intends to do just that, providing the capital to make VineStove open-source through donations by people like you and me.

The robotic intern is the reward. Donate at least $5, and you’ll earn the ability to join Armstrong in his team on the project by piloting the robot as a proxy. You’ll be able to freely move around the VineStove office, interact with the staff, help out with the website, or even just drive the thing into Casey’s foot for half an hour (if that’s your thing).

While the ability for VineStove to get a different intern with a different skill set each day is one that will undoubtedly add some flexibility to Armstrong’s team, he also states that the project has an aspect of novelty as well. “The robot idea is mostly just fun. I don’t know where it will lead. However, I’m a believer in the internet spilling out into the real world, and I think we’re going to see more internet controlled robots in the future,” Armstrong says. He went on to reference similar projects in the past, particularly one in which mTurk allowed people to remotely control a robotic arm to perform common household tasks.

Become a Member of Team Armstrong

If any bit of this sounds appealing to you, know that there is more than ample opportunity for you to join in and help Casey save the world. With a little more than two weeks left in the funding campaign, there’s plenty of time to donate and help bring microtasking to the masses. If you’ve got a unique set of skills, you can put them to work by signing up to be one of the robotic interns, or just using VineStove itself to do some good-old charity work; all you need is a Facebook registration.

Whether you want to live forever, build your own thriving online community, or just mess around with a robot for a few hours, Casey Armstrong has you covered, and the world is better off because of it.

Crowdfunding Offers Us A “Hebrew Hammer” Sequel, For Better Or Worse

First things first: I’m back! I’ve been planning a return since the end of December, and I was waiting for juuuuust the right story to usher in my comeback. Yes, I know about Beyoncé’s crowdsourced Super Bowl Halftime Show dealie, but I couldn’t care less about 90% of the words in that headline.

A crowd-funded sequel to the cult classic comedy Hebrew Hammer, though? Where the titular character squares off against Hitler in a time-traveling adventure with his buddy Jesus? That sort of thing is my bag, baby.

The funding campaign can be found on Jewcer, a crowdfunding platform geared specifically towards Jewish and Israeli projects, and as of now, with 20 days to go, has collected $40,000 of its $200,000 goal.

Here’s the video that Jonathan Kesselman posted on the project page, giving a little more detail about the project and the plot:

I thought the original movie was a great bit of fun, as long as it’s not taken too seriously, so the idea of our favorite Jewish private eye bouncing through history to fight the Jews’ ultimate nemesis is one that I can get behind. I plan on donating, and I’ll be watching this campaign closely over the next few weeks. I urge anyone who enjoyed the original movie, or who thinks that the world could use more oddball Jewish cinema, to do the same.

FixYa's new iPhone app lets you ask repair questions on video

Reblogged from GigaOM:

Got a broken coffee maker? Then why don’t you grab your iPhone(s aapl), and tell us about it? That’s the idea behind a new iOS app released by product Q&A community FixYa Thursday. The app lets users record short videos about the issues they are having with various devices - and experts respond on video as well. The new video feature represents a big step into mobile for FixYa, and foreshadows an interesting monetization strategy.

Read more… 250 more words

This is so useful I can't even stand it. Pretend that I'm not on hiatus and spent several paragraphs talking about how cool this is.