Taking its efforts to enable societal upliftment and provide additional income opportunities to the bottom 40% of the Malaysian population (B40) to the next level, Multimedia Development Corporation (MDeC) announced partnerships for crowd business
collaboration and crowdfunding under its Digital Malaysia initiative.
The partnerships, announced in conjunction with the inaugural Digital Malaysia National Crowdsourcing Conference, featured three crowd collaboration initiatives to enable the sourcing of microworkers from among the B40 and one crowdfunding programme to fund educational outreach efforts to rural areas.
The partnerships bring together crowdsourcing platform providers such as YourPartTime.com, managed by Human Capital Connection, and edusource.mmsc.com.my, managed by Multimedia Synergy Corporation; with industry players who will offer micro task opportunities such as copywriting, data entry and telemarketing to the public, particularly the B40 group.
Additionally, it also featured a partnership for crowdfunding opportunities through pitchIN, Malaysia's own version of crowdfunding platform for creative projects (similar to the US-based Kickstarter). pitchIN's partnership with Teach for Malaysia aims to generate enough funds to send teachers to teach underserved children in rural areas.
Speaking at the crowd business collaboration announcement ceremony, Datuk Badlisham Ghazali said, "We are happy to see so many partners involved in the development of greater crowdsourcing and crowd collaboration initiatives as this will provide more economic opportunities for Malaysians, particularly the B40. Over the past decade, crowdsourcing has unlocked the new power of the internet to provide more opportunities at lower costs and better value, through greater insights and varied inputs."
"By getting more Malaysians to offer and adopt crowdsourcing work through the internet, we are one step closer to move Malaysians from being consumers to producers of high value economic activity through digital technologies. This is our aim with Digital Malaysia," he continued.
Giving his keynote address at the opening of the Digital Malaysia National Crowdsourcing Conference, Ross Dawson, chairman of Advanced Human Technologies and author of 'Getting Results From Crowds' said, "In 2011, Foursquare's February Hackathon featuring hackers, engineers and developers sourced from the general public resulted in not only improvements to Foursquare but also the creation of 39 new apps that complement Foursquares' capabilities. While Ben & Jerry's discovered and created a new
ice cream flavour through its 'Do the World a Flavour' global crowdsourcing competition this year. Such is the power of crowdsourcing. While crowdsourcing has mostly grown organically, the Malaysian government's efforts to make it a part of the national digital agenda should be lauded as it will allow income and funding opportunities to better reach the right target members of society."
Sam Shafie, co-founder of pitchIN, added, "Over the years we have seen so many defining crowdfunding success stories in the creative sphere. In March this year for example, the Veronica Mars movie project was launched on Kickstarter and in less than 24 hours, the series creator secured the funding necessary to start filming even without the traditional backing of big Hollywood studios. This is the kind of opportunity that we hope to provide to our local creative minds. By disrupting the current funding model and getting everyone to help out with the projects that they believe in, we believe that not only will it strengthen the ecosystem for creative players, it will also validate the project due to the popularity and public support garnered."
The Digital Malaysia National Crowdsourcing Conference, in collaboration with JobsMalaysia.gov.my and supported by SME Corp, is a full day event aimed at sharing more updates on the Digital Malaysia initiative with highlights on Malaysia's approach in growing the local crowdsourcing / microsourcing industry. Additionally, it also aims to provide awareness to key decisions makers and industry players on the new emerging crowd business-models, technology-solutions and its ecosystem. Sessions include Crowd Market and Business Opportunities for Corporations and SMEs and Crowdsourcing and Future of Work: Society, Government and Industry Perspective.
MDeC hopes that more industry players and platform providers will come on board to enhance the crowdsourcing ecosystem in Malaysia. This will ensure that more members of the lower income group will benefit from greater income generating opportunities in the future.
