William Eggers on Crowdsourcing Social Problems

Recognize the distorted text to
your right? That’s a knock-off of CAPTCHA, the ingenious online
system for verifying that you are a human user of a website and not
some crawling bot. Ahn’s reCAPTCHA, now owned by Google, uses the
CAPTCHA interface to break up digitizing projects into two-word
chunks of old scanned texts. Users-an estimated 10 percent of the
world’s population-are unknowingly helping to digitize around 100
million words a day, the equivalent of about 2.5 million books a
year. William Eggers highlights this and other ways public,
private, and nonprofit organizations can use lightweight,
distributed approaches to solve societal problems faster and
cheaper than the existing sclerotic models.

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