BrightSpyre team partnered with Code for Pakistan for – Islamabad Civic Hackathon. Our team did a workshop on Crowdsourcing – Best way to design and implement crowdsourcing solutions and provided mentorship to participants during the event.
BrightSpyre team covered following topics during the workshop.
- Crowdsourcing
- Mapping and Open Data in Pakistan
- Integrating SMS into the civic applications
- MicroWork.
BrightSpyre team cited many experiences from Pakistan 2010 Reporting and Mapping System during its workshop. More than 30 participants attended the workshop.
Key advise for the workshop participants to devise crowdsourcing solutions were
– In Crowdsourced solutions don’t crowdsource only information collection. Crowdsource the decision making within the team members and stakeholders- Do whatever – they say and make fast decisions.
– Make champions in the team. Create leaderboard for most active participants. Lets them handle their decision making with full authority.
– Ignore trouble makers – When your project interfaces with large audience and contains teams from various parts of the world – there can be some trouble makers. Identify them in the beginning – ignore them and don’t let them demoralize your team and audience.
– Don’t be greedy – Don’t talk about all the time – what you want. Whether it is information, data, time or money. Do give back to the audience. be it data , information or the resources you get from the project.
– Make data open – Don’t be another Government. Make data open to others. We are one of the early champions and advocates of Open Data in Pakistan.
Here is link to the actual presentation on Crowdsourcing Civic Solutions and Open Data in Pakistan.
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