How TASKIO is Empowering the Crowd

“Work with Meaning… Powered by the Crowd” is TASKIO’s tagline… but what does that really mean?

I caught up with Steve Walker, TASKIO’s founder and director to find out.

Positive impact & social workforces

Mel: What is TASKIO about — in a nutshell?

Steve: We're creating a social workforce of people to create positive impacts, whether social and/or environmental using mobile technology to harness the power of the crowd.

Mel: How are crowdsourcing and mobile micro-tasking being used in connection with TASKIO?

Steve: A core belief behind TASKIO is a future reality where people will be earning a living from their mobile phones, and TASKIO is poised to be a platform to support that market.

Mobiles are essentially sensing devices — and they lend themselves well to recording activity and task actions.

Creating business transparency

Mel: Who are you aiming TASKIO at?

Steve: Ultimately we want our users to be able to use their mobile to coordinate impact projects or get involved in existing initiatives with a few taps on their phones. Set up a project, invite your friends, get to work, have targets, report back, share out your impact.

Two areas we believe we can provide major benefit to are NGOs and businesses who have a desire to provide higher levels of transparency in the work they do. We believe there are a lot of businesses around that want this.

Many businesses are dependent on getting funding or some form of investment. As an investor or funder often-times when you provide input into an entity, you don't really know what's going on with those funds.

We aim to provide detailed tracking, allowing a workforce to track their tasks and our clients to report back to stakeholders as to what activities have gone on. Transparency is powerful, and for an NGO it’s the right form of marketing.

Employment to disadvantaged communities

The other area that we're really excited about is bringing employment to disadvantaged communities. Potentially we can provide employment via physical and digital tasks, tracked via mobile phones, and then being rewarded with a wage. That's a mission we're really keen to pursue.

Mel: As we were talking about earlier, the fact is that these days access to mobile phones is a lot easier than it was a few years ago, with some areas having easier access to mobile phone technology than to clean water or to a decent toilet.

We've also talked before about people being zombies on phones.

Rescue the zombies?

Steve: Yes, mindless phone zombies drive me crazy. People have time as their most precious commodity and they waste it away looking at often meaningless social media. Can we reassign that use of time?

If we can transfer some of the mindless energy that's being used… if we could take just a small percentage of that time and re-assign it to more meaningful tasks, then we could create immense positive impact — just slightly re-engineering how people use their time and energy.

We're also really keen about public dashboards where people can demonstrate what they've done.

We're talking with some really interesting partners — tree plantations and mangroves, tracking populations of tigers, social empathy change, tracking environmental quality among others. We plan to log performance data of these NGOs and foundations — help them to prove that they're doing a great job and to use that information to bring in more funding, create more market awareness and to help them perform better as a business.

Sophisticated task tracking

Mel: Phones these days have got so much tech inside them - camera, audio, geolocation, all built in. So, there's endless data that you can put into any project, isn't there?

Steve: Absolutely! We’re starting with relatively simple tasks, but plan to provide custom integrations with measurement devices that plug in to phones such as air quality monitoring. Or integrating partner technology that allows task tracking via augmented reality.

Mel: So right now, you are in development stages of the app that's going to come out. You're developing the MVP, the minimum viable product, to test everything that you’ve been working on. So, what's happening now and what do the next few months hold?

Beta & MVP

Steve: We are starting private beta-testing as we speak, with some really interesting case studies that we believe will create a great story.

We are now looking for people out there who’d like to get involved in our beta programme. They can be individuals looking to create positive impact, either to setup their own projects or join others. And of course NGOs & businesses looking to provide better performance reporting.

Mel: I'm sure lots of people are wanting to find out more. How can they get involved at this stage?

Steve: If you’d like to say hello then please contact us, alternatively register for the beta programme while it’s available.

Would you like to get involved? Are you looking for meaningful work with purpose? Are you an NGO or charity that is looking for more transparency?

You can get in touch with the team at TASKIO or join the tribe on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter.