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/>.
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>