Crowdsource = Samasource

Logo from samasource.org

I learned about Samasource through a friend that actually did a documentary on/for the company. Dusty Hulet, djembe extraordinaire, monster run enthusiast, social entrepreneur aficionado and budding documentary producer, teamed up with the Peery Institute and traveled to Calcutta India to film a 5 minute promotional video about Samasource here.
 

Peery Film Fellowship - Samasource from Dusty Hulet on Vimeo.

There are fascinating things happening everyday in the world, unfortunately there are some very tragic things as well. It rare when the the two actually coincide with each other. One of the example however is Samasource. By using the internet Samasource has been able to turn tragedy into opportunity.

Many people are familiar with the term outsourcing, where certain tasks or jobs are performed outside of a company and sometimes outside of the country the company is even in! We learn from Adam Smith that it is more efficient to specialize and trade for services. We also learn from Ronald Coase that firms only appear when they can lower costs of certain transactions or projects. Besides some costs savings, there is no "law" the demands all of a business functions are under the same roof.

An evolution of outsourcing, made possible by the internet, is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing harnesses the power of the masses. The general idea is to take a huge number of fairly simple tasks, or complex tasks broken into smaller more simple tasks and have a huge number people work on the project together.

So how does Samasource fit into this? Samasource is a non-profit organization that connects businesses with people who traditionally have had very little opportunity for work. Businesses need a number of simple, yet important, tasks done everyday. These tasks can include, data entry, bookkeeping, call center services etc.

Samasource has tapped into the power of the 'crowd' by specifically targeting women in under developed countries and members of refugee camps to perform these tasks. These are people who are usually underemployed and have very limited opportunities to receive an education to become employed.

Because Samasource is a non-profit, they pass almost all of the profits directly to the women and refugee employees actually doing the work. Samasource really just works as a platform to connect businesses with people seeking work.

Samasource is growing in influence and scope, they offer data entry, advanced data entry, foreign language transcription and call center capabilities.