KAZNET: An open-source, micro-tasking platform for remote locations

Field surveys are the workhorse of social and environmental research, but conventional collection through monitors or enumerators are cost prohibitive in many remote or otherwise difficult settings, which can lead to a poor understanding of those environments and an underrepresentation of the people living in them. In such cases, micro-tasking can offer a promising alternative. By activating in-situ data collectors, micro-tasking avoids many of the large expenses related to conventional field survey processes. In addition to relaxing resource constraints, crowd-sourcing can be flexible and employ data quality protocols unheard-of for conventional methods. This study assesses the potential of using micro-tasking to monitor socioeconomic and environmental indicators in remote settings using a new platform called KAZNET. KAZNET leverages the network of people with smartphones, which are becoming ubiquitous even in the remote rural settings, to execute both long-term and short-term data collection activities, with flexibility to adjust or add tasks in real-time. It also allows for multiple projects, requiring different data types, to be rolled out in the same platform simultaneously. For the data-collector, KAZNET is effectively a wrapper for the commonly used and open source, Open Data Kit (ODK) software, which specializes in offline data collection. A web interface allows administrators to calibrate, deploy, and validate tasks performed by contributors. KAZNET has been used in several projects to collect data in remote pastoral regions of East Africa since its inception in 2017. KAZNET has shown to be effective for collecting high frequency and repeated measures from markets, households and rangelands in remote regions at relatively low cost compared to traditional survey methods. While the successes of micro-tasking are promising, there are clear trade-offs and complementarities between micro-tasking and standard surveys methods, which researchers and practitioners need to consider when implementing either approach.