Future Now
The IFTF Blog
Social philanthropy or feel-good outsourcing?
The New York Times has a piece on Serebra Connect, a freelance computer work marketplace with a social philanthropy twist:
Buyers post a task and sellers bid to complete the job. It’s a similar model to the popular freelance marketplace Elance — but with a feel-good twist. Most of the people bidding on the jobs are students in developing countries who have taken a course from Serebra Learning Corporation, the e-learning company where [Ted] Moorhouse is chairman and chief executive. He started Serebra Connect in October to help these students use their new skills....
Serebra Learning Corporation, based in Vancouver, British Columbia, sells online courses on topics like IT training and professional development to customers including Raytheon and Portland Public Schools. Moorhouse joined in 2002 and a year later started a program to offer $12 courses to students in the developing world in exchange for a certificate of completion. He has sold 2.5 million courses over the last four years, either directly to resellers or students or to organizations that donate the classes.
In 2006, while in an impoverished part of Johannesburg, South Africa, Moorhouse met one of his customers in an Internet cafe. The woman, who was dying of AIDS, was breast-feeding her baby while taking one of Serebra’s courses on Microsoft Excel on a computer. She told him that the certificates that Serebra sent to people who completed courses didn’t help her — she needed to use her skills to find a job.
The next day, on the flight home, Moorhouse dreamed up Serebra Connect. “It occurred to me we should have something like eBay for services, where people around the world who take courses could make money right in their own villages,” Moorhouse said. It’s different from similar sites like Elance or iFreelance.com, he said, because it is linked with classes, which gives students credibility when marketing their skills to potential buyers.
Naturally, comments are split among those who see this as just another form of outsourcing, and those who focus more on the benefits that can come from giving programmers or graphic artists from the developing world access to Western budgets for Web and graphic design.