I went for a walk the other day (along the path pictured at the top of my blog), and I was thinking about a question my sister had asked me a night or two before: “Do you think Obama is doing a good job?” My response was that he was doing as well as could be expected, but, no, not really. It seems to me that he started out naïvely believing he could preside over Congress in such a way that compromises could be reached so that shit could get done, but the problem was that the opposition party was so entirely focused on making sure he was a one-term president that they forced him to over-compromise pretty severely, only to vote against his proposals anyway.

Then, in what seemed to me a transparent ruse, they complained loudly that he was failing to provide strong leadership, by which they meant failing to come up with his own concrete plans. Obviously, they didn’t want his plans to succeed so much as they desired an opportunity concretely to ridicule them. Obama fell into their trap and came up with a jobs bill that combined the worst of Democratic ideas with strategies that have already largely failed in the recent past, and I thought (as I traipsed through the woods), “Why not propose something truly innovative, or at least some outside-the-box solution that would go beyond maybe dropping the unemployment rate a single percentage point?” The next logical question, of course, was “Okay, Mr. Smarty-pants” (by which I meant me), “like what?”

Well. The idea I came up with did not seem so extraordinary or even so very far outside the box, but it was this: Why not combine the microfinancing idea, the Wikipedia model and the buy-local movement to create jobs for literally everyone who wants one, sponsored by the willing participation of the 1%?

It seemed to me like a brilliant concept, and a little bit of web-searching put a better name on “the Wikipedia model” portion of it: “crowdsourcing.” In other words, I’m not the first to come up with the idea. At its heart, of course, it’s just the way society has always worked, with some people needing stuff and other people being in a position to provide it, but having never heard the term crowdsourcing before, it seemed as if the trees themselves had been suggesting it for years and waiting for someone to walk amongst them and listen.

I have almost no ability to implement my own version of the idea, but I would imagine that the place to start would be with a wikipedia-style web site functioning similarly to a microfinancing site. The first thing you’d do as webmaster would be to set up an entry for your own job. People who wanted to finance the job of webmaster would contribute money to that position, and that would be the sole source of the webmaster’s income (within the scope of this project–you could keep your job at Macy^⋆s^®, or whatever). The trick with all the positions on the site is that they would be continuously available to multiple people. A webmaster would be paid according to the number of pages created or–I don’t know–I’m thinking NOT hours worked, but rather, work accomplished, discrete chunks of work the quality of which could be verified by a second tier of workers whose job would be verification.

Other jobs I thought of were things like making clothes, building houses, scanning books into a digital library (like Google^® was trying to do before copyright holders started to complain). Modules could be developed for complex tasks like this, so that they easily could be broken down into component parts (so that, for instance, materials could be purchased by some, delivered by others and assembled by anyone with the requisite skills and equipment).

Actually, building houses in this day and age probably would not be necessary. Foreclosed properties could be put on sale through the site, multiple people could contribute to any given purchase, which could then be given to a homeless family. (Based on what? I don’t know. Would people sign up for several properties, provide some basic information and be voted up or down by random contributors? That doesn’t sound quite right, but surely the problem isn’t insurmountable.)

With the book scanning, some people’s job would be to acquire the rights first. (To be honest, this was my first idea: Book digitizing funded by the government. But the microfinancing model does away with the need for (and bureaucracy of) the government.) Others would scan/type, or proofread, or format, etc.

Logins and passwords would be freely available. Multiple logins (even anonymous logins) would be acceptable, since payment would be based on work accomplished and independently verified. People could log in from any computer, public or private. Funds could be direct-deposited into bank accounts or … or jobs and money could be distributed through local service centers, which could be set up as projects of their own.

The idea of using the internet to match needs to workers is hardly new, but this would be targeted at unskilled labor and uncentralized. It wouldn’t be Levi’s^® asking people to sew jeans. Instead it would be some random person signing up to receive a pair of pants, someone else donating a sewing machine, fabric and/or funding, and yet another person receiving the sewing machine, doing the work and getting paid. The need to ship such goods could end up being the salvation of the Postal Service^™.

The whole thing would be like Craigslist^® except, rather than individual people selling individual things or services to other individuals, it would be individuals submitting ideas, multiple other individuals taking a liking to the idea and either implementing or funding it.

Earnings would be roughly the same for every job, so that people would choose work based on what they like to do rather than on what makes them the most money. It should work out to be better than minimum wage. At least twice, in my opinion, but I can almost see the list of questions expanding in your mind.

Such ideas are always more complicated than they seem. Who would be employing whom? How would people pay taxes on their income? Would reporting be volunary, or would we have to collect SS#s and send out W-2s? Would there be age restrictions? What about health insurance? Would it put a squeeze on small businesses who might lose employees to the success of this scheme? Most importantly of all, could people be prevented from operating virtual sweat shops?

The main point of the idea is that we as a larger community would be taking matters into our own hands to provide employment for one other. Are there so many legal restrictions imposed on us that such a thing is impossible? If so, then are we okay with that, or would we like Congress to lift some of those restrictions? I’m assuming we wouldn’t want some big corporation to come in and turn it into a huge profit-making vehicle for their shareholders and CEO, but that notion brings up yet another question: Can this venture become self-sustaining?

Would it always be a charitable organization, or might there be income through the sale of goods and services as well? Can such a project be run without a single person in charge (or ultimately accountable)? Should it be that, instead of being funded by the 1% (or 10%, or whatever), it should be entirely by, for and of the 14 million who are unemployed? Through creative sharing, limited resources like food, shelter, clothing and learning could be redistributed to everyone in need.

It was roughly at this point in my writing that I decided to do a Google^® search or two on the topic, which led me (first of all to the term “crowd-sourcing” and then) to a facebook app called CloudCrowd that provided me with the hope of ending my own erstwhile search for employment. Funny that I’d never heard of it until I came up with the concept on my own. I had tried Elance^® a couple of years ago, but never got so much as a nibble on my proposals. CloudCrowd’s reliance on “credibility points” in lieu of submitting a proposal to each potential client seemed like a huge leap forward.

It didn’t work out. Many of the jobs I was interested in required me to pass a test in “Writing (General)” or “(English) Editing.” I took both tests and eagerly awaited the results.

They both were rejected (by my peers, apparently). The first for not being written in the third person (which was not part of the instructions) and the second for incorrect capitalization and ESL phrasing. The latter assignment had been to take 80-100 words from a Japanese web page that had already been translated into poor English and edit said words into proper English. The website advertised “Noodle Making Machines,” which I mistakenly considered to be the proper name of the machines and so failed to change the capitalization. As for the ESL phrasing, well, you’ve read enough of my writing in this very article to decide whether or not I am sounding like native speaker.

Web searches for CloudCrowd provided plenty of negative reactions from former workers, but of course it’s hard to say, looking in from the outside, how deep the problems lie. The problems I encountered on the first day were enough to convince me not to waste my time trying to appeal my rejections. I simply deleted the app from my facebook account and returned to blogging (and whatever else I might find to fill my days). My suspicion is that CloudCrowd workers have found ways of gaming the system, to keep the good jobs for themselves and to keep out unwanted competition, but maybe I’m just being big-(and/or pig-)headed.

As for the danger of people learning to game my own crowdsourcing idea, I have to believe it’s possible to disincentivize such activity, but that sort of thinking is not really my forté. I’m better at writing fiction (or so I like to believe), and I certainly lack the programming skills even to begin such an undertaking. It seems likely, then, that this post has been little more than an exercise in futility, but if I really believed in the potential of my concept I suppose I would teach myself how to implement it. Who knows? If the idea continues to grow on me even after I’ve finished my novel, I just might try.