Crowdsourcing
I recently picked up a copy of Crowdsourcing, the new book by Jeff Howe, and read it on my flight home from Chicago O'Hare. According to Wikipedia, "Crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people, in the form of an open call." This is a pretty good definition.
The book focuses on some of my favorite sites like Threadless and InnoCentive. The latter was used in a discussion of how to use crowdsourcing to address social and environmental issues. InnoCentive has partnered with foundations to create cash prizes for the crowd in order to find solutions to diseases and other huge social and health challenges.
This is very cool, but it raises two questions:
1) Do you need economic incentives to have people seek solutions to collective societal issues?
2) How do we use this model to address smaller but critical issues facing nonprofits in various issue areas? Good social science problem solving could greatly improve existing programs.
This book is one of the major inspirations for our work at The Extraordinaries - we're asking the question "How can we use the crowdsourcing model, that we've seen work so well in other domains (Wikipedia, Innocentive, Threadless, etc), and apply it to social good." You can see what we came up with here: http://www.theextraordinaries.org/about.html
In answer to your question #1:
No, we don't. The payback here is social reputation and feeling good about yourself. Our research has shown (as I'm sure yours' does) that people are wanting to make a difference - and that they have spare cycles. So giving them the tools to do good in these spare cycles is where the sweet spot is (at least we think so).