Posts Tagged ‘overview’

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Launching the next phase of the Mobenzi pilot

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June 18, 2010  |  by Mark  |  Features, Homepage, Pilot Project, Press  |  , , ,  |  No Comments
On May 26th we invited some representatives from the press to the launch of the next phase of our Mobenzi pilot project in KwaNyuswa (Valley of a thousand hills, KZN).
During our two week trial run in December 2009, agents had completed Mobenzi tasks using our company owned phones, under supervision and together at a central location. Since May 26th however, a group of agents have been working independently as private contractors to Mobenzi.
These are some of the major factors that make the launch of this phase of the pilot a significant step forward.
1. Agents work in their own time, requesting batches of tasks whenever they have a few minutes spare.
2. They complete tasks while at home, travelling on public transport or even between lectures at college.
3. Most of the agents are using their own mobile phones after having installed the Mobenzi application from a link we sent to them.
4. With each task that agent’s complete, associated credit is built up in their account. Once credit reaches a certain thresh-hold, funds are disbursed electronically to their phones using FNB’s SendMoney platform. Although some agents had to borrow our company phones, many have earned enough income from Mobenzi to purchase their own, brand new compatible Nokia phones.
These changes in the way the pilot is being run are allowing us to test the scalability of the concept. We can now manage recruitment of new agents, assignment of tasks, monitoring of quality and disbursement of funds all from our central office. With this platform in place, it is only the demand from businesses for the services of our agents that will slow the growth of Mobenzi.
Some of the agents had a lot to say about Mobenzi and what it means to them.
Nokuthula Njoko said that she feels empowered by being involved with Mobenzi.
“It helps me focus on the work I’m doing, knowing that for each task I complete I will be paid. I’ve learnt to be a critical thinker and enjoy the challenge of learning new words and abbreviations in different languages and in business terms. I’ve even made myself a book where I write down all the words I don’t understand, then later find their meanings. Mobenzi has given me employment, empowerment and an education in the business world”.
Civil engineering student, Trevor Ngcobo said being a Mobenzi agent enables him to study and still work at his own leisure.
“I never have to worry about transport problems, being late for work or not having time to attend college. I can make money, study and even do my Mobenzi tasks in a taxi on my way to lectures. It’s helped me in more ways than I thought when I first started”.
Msizi Phewa relishes in the fact that he can tell his peers that he ‘works on the internet and analyses data’.
“It makes me feel so important when I tell people that I work with analysing information from social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook. And because it’s something you can do in your spare time and you are paid for it, your mind is not focused on distractions of drugs, alcohol and hanging out with unproductive and negative people on the streets. I want the world to eventually be plugged into Mobenzi so that we can have an entire planet of productive people”.
It is awesome to hear such positive feedback from agents, especially when referring to some of the benefits they are realising that we had never considered.

On May 26th we invited some representatives from the press to the launch of the next phase of our Mobenzi pilot project in KwaNyuswa (Valley of a thousand hills, KZN).

During our two week trial run in December 2009, agents had completed Mobenzi tasks using our company owned phones, under supervision and together at a central location. Since May 26th however, a group of agents have been working independently as private contractors to Mobenzi.

These are some of the major factors that make the launch of this phase of the pilot a significant step forward.

  1. Agents are now working in their own time, requesting batches of tasks whenever they have a few minutes spare.
  2. They complete tasks while at home, travelling on public transport or even between lectures at college.
  3. Most of the agents are using their own mobile phones after having installed the Mobenzi application from a link we sent to them.
  4. With each task that agent’s complete, associated credit is built up in their account. Once credit reaches a certain thresh-hold, funds are disbursed electronically to their phones using FNB’s SendMoney platform. Although some agents had to borrow our company phones, many have already earned enough income from Mobenzi to purchase their own, brand new compatible Nokia phones.

These changes in the way the pilot is being run are allowing us to test the scalability of the concept. We can now manage recruitment of new agents, assignment of tasks, monitoring of quality and disbursement of funds all from our central office.

With this platform in place, it is only the demand from businesses for the services of our agents that will slow the growth of Mobenzi.

View from Light Providers Live results Drive into Kwanyuswa 1000 hills Participants helping each other
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Pilot Project Summary: Creating jobs using mobile phones in an African township

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January 5, 2010  |  by Mark  |  Features, Homepage, Pilot Project  |  , , , ,  |  1 Comment
For two weeks, from November 20th to December 4th 2009, we conducted a pilot project in the Valley of a Thousand Hills in South Africa. We hope that this project will lead to a revolutionary new service that will create a new type of job for thousands of underprivileged people.

About Mobenzi

Mobenzi is a software service that empowers people to be rewarded for completing simple tasks on their mobile phones. These tasks involve certain types of problems that are difficult for a computer to solve without assistance from a real person – even someone without expert knowledge of the problem.

Find out more about how Mobenzi works

Purpose of the pilot project

For two weeks we equipped pilot participants with the Mobenzi software application installed on standard mobile phones to assess whether they could effectively complete simple business tasks using only their phones.

These were some of the guiding questions we were attempting to answer during the pilot.

  • Is the concept easy to understand?
  • Is the technology easy to use?
  • What types of tasks are feasible?
  • What types of people are most suitable for doing Mobenzi tasks?
  • What is the best way to present a given task to an agent?
  • How long does it take to complete different types of tasks?
  • What quality should be expected in the results of completed tasks?
  • What issues are involved that may affect attrition rates (fatigue, boredom etc)?
  • Could the service grow through viral expansion (Can participants teach each other)?
  • Based on other findings, what are the financial implications with regard to agent remuneration and the cost of the service to organisations?

Project location and venue

A view of The Valley of a Thousand Hillslight_providers_community_centreView from Light Providers

We ran the pilot project from the Light Providers community centre in KwaNyuswa. The area lies on the outskirts of urban development, west of the Inanda Dam, about 40 minutes outside of Durban in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. It is one of the largest of the various tribal authorities that make up the Valley of a Thousand Hills.

Due to the gross unemployment rates in the region, and our close proximity to the area (Only 14km from our office), we selected KwaNyuswa as the location for our pilot project.

Format of the pilot

We started the first week of the pilot with 5 participants who would later act as mentors when 20 new recruits joined them for the second week. We spent the first week testing out various types of human intelligence tasks and discussing issues surrounding understanding the use of the mobile application as well as the various types of tasks themselves.

During the second week we had more participants to help work through large sets of tasks. We assigned participants various types of tasks and recorded completion times and responses for all participants so that we could crunch the data to assess what factors affect quality and efficiency.

We focused on text-based human intelligence tasks

We decided to focus on “Text to Form” tasks for the pilot project. These types of tasks involve extracting structured data from free-text.

Some examples of this type of task include:

A simple task to assist in sorting sms survey responses.
An example of a simple task to assist in sorting sms survey responses.

For all of these tasks, we displayed a short instruction for the task, followed by the content (such as an SMS or a tweet) and then a series of questions about the content (Such as whether the SMS included a person’s name). The participant worked through each task one step at a time.

Find out about other types of human intelligence tasks

Results of the first phase of our pilot project

One of the critical factors affecting the feasibility of Mobenzi is whether or not the mobile application is easy to use for people who have had little exposure to the internet and other software applications. A quote from the summary of the first day of the pilot shows how easily the participants understood both the concept of doing work on their phones as well as how to use the application itself:

Without any instruction, most of the participants had the application open and simply started completing tasks. Although I had high expectations, I still thought there would be many questions and a fairly slow start. But within half an hour of me arriving at the venue, the participants had their heads down and were completing tasks. A few questions popped up during the day, but none that the other participants couldn’t answer themselves.

Using the software to complete tasks came very naturally and required almost zero training. From the participant comments, it is also clear that there would be a huge demand for Mobenzi tasks. I believe we could easily find thousands of Mobenzi agents who already own compatible phones within just half an hour’s drive of our offices in Hillcrest, let alone the rest of South Africa and the world.

We have not yet done much analysis on the quality or efficiency of the completed tasks, but initial assessments are very positive. Over the next few weeks we will be crunching the data to help answer some more of the questions we outlined at the start of the pilot.

The results so far have exceeded our expectations and at this stage I would guess that our biggest challenge in moving forward will be to generate a sufficient supply of tasks to keep Mobenzi agents busy.

Scaling up the pilot in April 2010

This pilot was a short 2 week project to get an early feel for what to expect. In April next year we will scale our efforts up and take on a much larger group of participants to pilot the concept further. Until then we will be tweaking the software and preparing the systems to handle the logistics of a much larger project.

We are very open to suggestions if you have any ideas for types of tasks or even real world data that we could get Mobenzi agents to process during our pilot later this year.

Live results Participants helping each other