Human.io is the new thing from Joshua Schachter, founder of bookmarking
site del.icio.us.
This time, however, he's not suggesting you share your travels with a few
friends — he's suggesting that you turn them into an army.
"If you want to build a flash mob, but have it actually do something
useful, this is your API," Schachter said. "It lets you invite your
audience to become part of the action."
The concept—developed by Paul Rademacher, creator of legendary
Craigslist/Google Maps mashup Housingmaps, and Nick Nguyen, formerly of
Yahoo and Mozilla — is straightforward enough: Human.io is a platform for
performing "micro-tasks".
First, you publish a simple, crowdsourceble activity, such as voting on
something, going to a particular location, or taking photos — anything that
might be accomplished with a smartphone's UI and its sensors. Then you tell
your readers, followers or friends about it. They start the app, get
cracking, and, finally, the results are sent back to you.
To illustrate how the platform works, Human.io developed an app aimed at
benefiting the Creative Commons, and Wiki Loves Monuments in particular: <
http://wikipedia.human.io/>gt;.
The idea is to help Wikipedia's project to improve public access to
photography of the world's architectural and local heritage. If you want to
participate, install the free Human.io app (iOS, Android) and select the
"Photograph a historic place" task. It'll cough up a list of anything
nearby that's in the online encyclopedia's monument hit list. All you have
to do is head out, take a shot, and let Human.io do the rest. It'll show up
immediately at wikipedia.human.io, released under the Creative Commons
Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
It bridges the gap between a useful task — in this case, contributing to
Wikipedia's potential coverage of your neighborhood's history — and folks
who might not otherwise be in a position to help out, let alone have fun
doing so.
<http://boingboing.net/2012/09/25/humanio.html>