One of my clients (Twomile Heavy Industries) is building a large website. He is involved in the non profit technology world (NTEN, CTNC, etc), and ran across Samasource, which is a social enterprise to bring outsourcing work into the developing world. And not just Bangalore–they have work centers in refugee camps. They will be providing some testing services for this project.
Samasource offers a wide variety of services, all via screened partners. I seem them as a cross between Odesk (which an interviewee touchs on here), Elance (which I joined, mostly to see what kind of jobs are available) and Kiva (which I learned about via Andrew Leonard). See Samasource’s take on comparisons to Odesk and Elance in their FAQ.
What a great idea! Very ‘the world is flat’. This type of social enterprise overcomes my main objection to Kiva, because Samasource could provide a cost savings to their clients; compare that to Kiva, which provides no monetary return to lenders.
Anyhow, I’ll try to update when I’ve actually engaged with the folks that Samasource led us to, but it was such a cool business model I had to give them a shout out.
[tags]social enterprise, outsourcing, developing world[/tags]
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