Gauging Receptiveness to Social Microvolunteering

Crowd-powered systems that help people are difficult to scale and sustain because human labor is expensive and worker pools are difficult to grow. To address this problem we introduce the idea of social microvolunteering, a type of intermediated friendsourcing in which a person can provide access to their friends as potential workers for microtasks supporting causes that they care about. We explore this idea by creating Visual Answers, an exemplar social microvolunteering application for Facebook that posts visual questions from people who are blind. We present results of a survey of 350 participants on the concept of social microvolunteering, and a deployment of the Visual Answers application with 91 participants, which collected 618 high-quality answers to questions asked over 12 days, illustrating the feasibility of the approach.