Crowdsourcing Promises Efficiencies for Global Poverty-Fighting Organization

World Vision launches "Sponsor a Solution" campaign among developer communities

LOS ANGELES, Dec. 8, 2011 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- This month, global relief and development organization World Vision will launch its first ever crowdsourcing initiative, the Sponsor a Solution campaign. The campaign is a pilot effort aiming to engage the public's collective expertise in identifying effective and sustainable solutions to technological challenges faced in supporting relief and development programs. 

World Vision is partnering with Brightidea, the leader in cloud-based social innovation management software, to leverage their crowdsourcing application in this campaign.

Crowdsourcing is a distributed problem-solving and production model. In this model, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task, or help capture and analyze large amounts of data. Crowdsourcing invites the participation of experts, enthusiasts and volunteers, primarily outside the organization, to produce solutions in their spare time to collaboratively resolve these technology challenges. Input from businesses and educational institutions is also valued.

"This is an important pilot for us to engage the IT professional community, within and outside World Vision, in helping us innovate and deliver faster and better solutions to the challenges we face in the field," said Govi Pillai, World Vision's global ICT leader.

The campaign will initially focus on finding effective and sustainable solutions in two key areas:

• Field data collection and transmission:  World Vision seeks innovative technological solutions that better enable field staff to accurately and efficiently process, validate and transmit data gathered from the field.
• Fixed asset and inventory tracking:  World Vision seeks to enhance its logistics and tracking solutions for processing and moving thousands of business asset items across multiple locations worldwide.

"The Sponsor a Solution campaign is about finding a better way of ramping up innovation quickly by getting many great minds – beyond our employee base – working on various issues at the same time. In the simplest form, we identify a technology challenge and provide opportunities for IT professionals to take part in providing a possible solution, from coming up with the idea to helping us test and implement these solutions.  We want to give people the opportunity to use their technical talents to help us solve the technology challenges that we face," said Adam Dayvolt, World Vision's global ICT representative who is spearheading the campaign.

The Sponsor a Solution campaign is an exploratory initiative for World Vision, which hopes to test the capabilities of crowdsourcing in finding viable solutions to a wide array of challenges with using technology in some of the world's most remote locations.

"With the help of developers across the world, World Vision will be able to identify more efficient and effective technology solutions that allow us to more strategically improve the lives of children throughout the world," added Dayvolt.

To know more about the Sponsor a Solution campaign and how to get involved, visit: https://vision.brightidea.com/world.

About World Vision

World Vision is a Christian humanitarian organization dedicated to working with children, families, and their communities worldwide reach their full potential by tackling the causes of poverty and injustice. We serve the world's poor— regardless of religion, race, ethnicity or gender. For more information on their efforts, visit WorldVision.org/press or follow them on Twitter at @WorldVision.

SOURCE World Vision International