Slivers of Time - uses texting to manage disperate temporary workers

Slivers of Time, unfortunately badged with the rather defunct Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, is a rather interesting way of buying and selling hours of time and effort.

So, for example, if you were looking for 2 people to help out at a conference this afternoon, you could do a quick query and find some people locally who were a) available and b) ranked by reliability and reputation (ebay style).  To order them, you simply make a few clicks and they then turn up to your conference to help out.  All the payments and whatnot are handled by Slivers of Time making the whole process exceptionally painless for both buyers and sellers.

Alex was watching the BBC’s Working Lunch and saw a feature about them.  He comments:

The interesting thing is that the seller (ie the worker) gets a text asking them to accept the booking by replying with yes or no, then it sorts out the rest.

That’s very smart.  I’m really encouraged to see such good use of the medium being implemented by an organisation closely aligned with the UK Government.