For details, reread headline.

Aymeric said "thanks" to the Chaffeys, the Wares, the Fillingers, the Lees and King John for coming to see "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)."  As for the rest of us . . . well, the Four-Way Test precludes any editorializing. But Aymeric had his revenge on us. He participated in a skit with His Fazelness and former King Fillinger that made last week's "Karnac the Magnificent" carnage look like, well, Shakespeare.

FOUNDATION, COOKIES, GAZEBOS AND CLYDESDALES

The upcoming activities are nothing if not eclectic. On May 15 you can head out to Rush Ranch in Suisun City to help spruce up the Access America HQ and see some of the biggest horses you will ever encounter. Fazel is the Man What Am for this one.

THREE-QUARTER CENTURY CLUB LUNCH COMING UP

Mark June 16 on your calendar. That's when the next Three-Quarter Century Club lunch is happening. All Orinda residents 75 and older are invited to lunch at the Orinda Community Church. This year's speaker is Rosie the Riveter.  Really. Along with Prudential Realty, we are a sponsor of this event, and we will need volunteers.  Help out if you can; it's actually a lot of fun.

TIME TO EXTEND THE HELPING HAND AGAIN

We've done it for Palm Bay, Florida after hurricanes hit.  We've done it for Cedar Rapids, Iowa, after the floods.  It looks it's time we did it for Nashville, Tennessee. The Cumberland River has made one heck of a mess of the Music City, and they're going to need a boatload of aid.  Skip McCowan brought up the idea of LSR hooking up with a Nashville area club, and it's a darn good one. More to come, so be prepared to help out. We're good at it, and they need it.

PROGRAM

Imagine you graduated from Harvard. Imagine further that you've gone to Ghana to teach kids who have a yen to learn and not a whole lot else.  You have come to the conclusion that we (meaning well-meaning Western do-gooders) have helped create a "culture of handouts," an ethos is much of the world that stresses scoping for handouts as a viable -- perhaps the most viable -- means of getting ahead.  You've noted that there are hundreds of millions of people who are out in the sticks with no possibility of becoming a part of whatever economic development may be coming to the urban areas.  So what do you do?

If you are Leila Janah, today's speaker, you start Samasource.  In a nutshell, Samasource is a non-profit 501c(3) that puts people in the Third World to work doing digital tasks.  There are any number of companies that are up to their eyeballs in e-work that needs doing.  Transcribing.  Tagging photos.  Cleaning up optically scanned text.  All of this stuff and more is labor intensive, and it can be easily sent electronically all over the world. So Samasource trains folks around the world to do the work.  Then it finds companies that need the work done.  Samasource breaks it down to bite-sized pieces and sends it out to however many of their trained workers it will take to complete the project on time. Most but not all of the workers are women, youngsters and refugees.  All work performed is checked for quality control and then delivered back to the company.

One example of a Samasource project: An author had many, many tapes of interviews for a possible book.  The author did not have time to transcribe them.  So Samasource and its network of digital workers did it. 

Another example is Benetech, a company that produces digitized books for the visually impaired.  Optical character reading can attain a high percentage of accuracy, but not high enough.  A human still has to do the final work.  Benetech came to Samasource, and, since 2008, three teams in Kenya have been engaged. 

What makes the work work is the confluence of three trends: literacy rates are going up, computer access is spreading all over the world, and English is spoken and understood in much of the world.  Thanks to satellite dishes and generators, Internet access is available in places you would never expect. And since the work that Samasource is brokering can be e-mailed back and forth, this means that this work also can be done in places you might never expect. 

Ms. Janah sees this as the 21^st century equivalent of Henry Ford's assembly line.  As did the assembly line, widespread Internet access means that large projects can be broken down to smaller pieces and parceled out to many workers.  Just as the assembly line dramatically expanded the middle class in 20th century America, Internet-sourced work has the potential to expand paying work to rural and refugee-camp Third World individuals, thereby dramatically increasing the number of people who can earn a living wage instead of waiting for handouts that accomplish little, if anything.

Samasource workers need to be English-speaking (there is some demand for French speakers) and to have completed some high school.   Most Samasource workers already have computer experience. It takes one to three months to train the workers, and there is supervision before they are turned loose to work on their own.  At the end of the process, these workers are ready to earn a living rather than beg for one.  Thus, every person trained to do e-work for Samasource means one fewer person who perforce is a part of the culture of handouts.

So far, roughly 600 workers are part of the Samasource network, and Samasource has done about $500,000 in sales.  Ms. Janah and her crew have crunched the numbers, and the best estimate is that it will take about $6 to $7 million per year in business. Since the outsourcing industry accounts for about $200 billion per year, it would appear there is room for Samasource.  In the meantime, Samasource is funded in major part by foundations and other donors.

This is a great program, one that has the potential to bring many people around the world out of poverty. It is all the more impressive when one considers that Ms. Janah  graduated from college all of five years ago.

Thank you, Ms. Janah, for telling us about Samasource. It is heartening to know that, along with technological advances, there are people like you figuring out how to make that technology work to make the world better for so many.