Low-Cost Crowd-Solving of Agricultural Development

Rastislav Ivanic of Oliver's Planet, Inc. in the U.S. will develop their online platform using SMS to crowd source expertise from the developing world's rural farmers in order to better design and execute agricultural initiatives and promote their funding. The platform will collect simple statements by SMS directly from the farmers without charge on possible solutions to relevant problems, and use them to build feasible and supported solutions. These possible solutions will then be sent back to the farmers for them to rate. With the help of local collaborators, they will recruit rural farmers to field test the platform with two to four projects and evaluate cost, farmer participation, idea generation, and the ability of crowd-solving to generate workable solutions.