Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work. A friend who is a reader of Fixes recently told me she was often frustrated by the column. She doesn’t run a nongovernmental organization or design products to help bottom-of-the-pyramid consumers get drinkable water. She isn’t going to take six months to volunteer in Nepal. She’s a New Yorker with a job — what can she do, she asked, to contribute to changing the world?  Fixes looks at solutions to social problems and why they work.  There’s always writing a check, of course. Money is what every project needs most. Beyond that, however, there is a relatively new way for individuals to participate in social change through crowdsourcing, which is a fix in itself.  The crowdsourcing concept — collecting contributions from many individuals to achieve a goal — was being used long before Wikipedia. The National Audubon Society has been organizing people to do an annual count of all the birds in the Western hemisphere since Christmas Day, 1900. The Pilsbury Bake-Off — crowdsourcing for a commercial cause — is now 62 years old.  But online crowdsourcing is a relatively recent phenomenon, and the efficiencies it brings to communicating within a large group make it useful in many new ways. Many of us use crowdsourcing without thinking about it. If you’ve ever made a purchase on eBay, read customer reviews on Amazon.com to help you decide which rollerblades to buy or used comments on TripAdvisor.com to plan a vacation, you’ve taken advantage of crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing is being applied in many fields. At catwalkgenius.com it is bringing together fashion designers and financial backers. At usertesting.com it provides feedback on why people leave your Web site. It connects musicians and their fans to help organize private concerts at owngig.com. Innocentive.com uses it to solve scientific and technological problems: companies stuck on a problem put it up on the site and offer a cash prize for a solution. About 30 percent of the time, an outsider solves the problem — often someone who isn’t even in the same field.  But we are mainly interested in what crowdsourcing can do to help civilians contribute to social change in a way that is both useful and emotionally satisfying. A lot of people want to connect to a cause in a way that goes beyond writing a check. Crowdsourcing can help.  Since money is what most social change projects need most, many crowdsource Web sites are really there for crowdfunding. On Friday, I’ll write about how giving to causes through these sites differs from donating to charity in more old-fashioned ways. Today, I’ll look at how crowdsourcing can help with something else: aggregating and organizing knowledge.  Immediately after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactors began to fail in Japan, people turned to official sources for information. What they heard were often bland and vague assurances of safety. But people wanted specifics. They wanted to know the radiation levels in their areas, and did not trust the government sources. In response, several crowdsource sites sprang up to collect and map radiation levels in Japan and even on the west coast of the United States: rdtn.org, geigercrowd.net and japanstatus.com are three of them. These sites ask people with Geiger counters — and if you happen to not own one, they tell you where to buy one — to measure radiation levels and send the information to their site. They aggregate and map the responses. (Steve Lohr of The Times has written a helpful piece today on how crowdsourcing information in emergencies can be improved.)  One prototype for this kind of crowdsourcing is Ushahidi.com. Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili, was developed in Kenya in 2008 to map numerous reports of post-election violence. Ory Okolloh, a blogger, simply asked her readers: “Guys looking to do something: Any techies out there willing to do a mash up of where the violence and destruction is occurring using Google Maps?”  A few days later, Kenyans had a Web site that allowed people to text or e-mail reports and see them plotted on a Google map of the country. It became useful not only for rapid intervention, but — as the name suggests — to document the deaths, injuries and destruction when virtually all other media were blacked out.  Since then, Ushahidi, led until recently by Okolloh, has become as ubiquitous in a disaster as the Red Cross. Just two hours after the earthquake in Haiti, Ushahidi set up a Haiti site and an Ushahidi techie who was studying at Tufts University in Massachusetts worked with a student group to organize 300 volunteers. Haitian radio stations told their listeners to text 4636 with their reports, which thousands of Creole-speaking volunteers in the U.S. instantly translated. Any report that required action — about or from a trapped person, for example — was mapped by the volunteers and sent to rescuers.  Ushahidi has tracked reports of election fraud in Mexico, damage caused by the Gulf oil spill and critical shortages of important medicines at public health clinics in Uganda. During Washington’s Snowmageddon last winter, Ushahidi was used to map obstacles like stuck cars and toppled trees. The idea was not to just give information to official work crews, but to allow ordinary citizens to organize themselves. Anyone with a shovel and a strong back could check the map for a site nearby and go. It has since been used in snow emergencies in other cities, including New York.  How can you be sure the information on a crowdsource site is trustworthy? Well, you can’t. But Ushahidi is taking a stab at vetting its data through, of course, crowdsourcing. Its Swift River project aggregates and plots on maps not only data sent or texted to Ushahidi, but combines it with data from Twitter, YouTube and other sources. When data comes in, anyone can rate it for trustworthiness. The higher the rating it gets, the more prominently it is displayed.  Crowdsourcing can aggregate ideas as well as data. The California-based design firm Ideo has a site called openideo.com, which posts various challenges: How can we get people to register to be bone-marrow donors? How can we use cell phones to improve maternal health in poor countries? How can we get kids more interested in eating fresh food? Each challenge has a financial sponsor: a group interested in solving the problem — the kids and food challenge, for example, was sponsored by British chef and healthy food crusader Jamie Oliver.  The process collects random ideas from the public, winnows them down by theme and then asks readers to refine the ideas. The public then votes. “The site mirrors a brainstorming process,” said Beth Kanter, a blogger about social media and co-author of “The Networked Nonprofit.” Seventeen ideas “won” the food challenge, among them: put up kids’ advertising in the supermarket produce aisle, have cool teens teach cooking classes for younger kids, organize student-run farmer’s markets to sell produce from local farmers.  Jamie Oliver’s organization has launched a project with OpenIDEO, an initiative to help working people cook more. But this was not one of the winning ideas. “People want to be thought of as something other than a source of money. They want to be thought of as creative, thinking people,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. ”It’s not hard to contribute ideas, but the question is how helpful it is.”  Crowdsourcing is also, of course, frequently used in journalism. Many media organizations now turn to readers for their experiences and for reporting help, but few do so as consistently and productively as ProPublica, a nonprofit group that produces investigative journalism that is published in media around the country, including in The Times. ProPublica’s Distributed Reporting Project has asked for information and tips from people affected by a variety of issues, including the Gulf oil spill and the mortgage and loan crisis. A request for information from people who had tried to modify their home loans brought some 3,000 responses, said Amanda Michel, ProPublica’s director of online engagement. Those contacted were asked to document their claims. ProPublica was aware its sample was far from random, but that wasn’t the aim. “We can take a much more nuanced and granular look at complex processes by learning about the experiences of several thousand people,” said Michel. “We’re not relying on a government official to tell us what is the average bad experience.”  Readers can not only provide information to reporters about their own experiences, they can be reporters. For example, for its Stimulus Spot Check, ProPublica recruited readers to “rummage around on the state’s Department of Transportation Web site and make several follow up-calls over the next week” to see how some 500 road and bridge projects were doing. They were given instructions on how to find out whether projects had been started, which companies had the contracts and how many jobs were produced. Although the Obama adminstration touted the summer of 2009 as “the summer of stimulus,” the resulting story, published on August 18, 2009, reported that two thirds of the projects would be starting in the fall instead, and that states with very high unemployment tended to be moving more slowly than others.  For all their novelty, crowdsourcing projects like these will only have a connection to a small numbers of readers’ lives. Many people’s impulse to better the world around them is usually satisfied by giving money. Crowdsourcing offers ways to do that, as well — but in ways that may offer donors more impact and a stronger connection to the social change happening on the ground. On Friday, I’ll explain how it works.  ﻿Join Fixes on Facebook and follow updates on twitter.com/nytimesfixes.  Tina Rosenberg won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Haunted Land: Facing Europe’s Ghosts After Communism.” She is a former editorial writer for The Times and now a contributing writer for the paper’s Sunday magazine. Her new book is “Join the Club: How Peer Pressure Can Transform the World.”
The explosion of online crowdsourcing offers a number of ways for average citizens to contribute to the common good.