Overview of the emergence and advancement of crowdsourcing for commercial and social uses. Presentation mostly emphasizes current uses and the firms supporting the business model. Presenters are encourage to spend some time with a few of these sites as a clickworker to get a good understanding of the models.
5. CROWDSOURCING The act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to an undefined, large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open call. WikiPedia CLOUD COMPUTING WITH PEOPLE
6. WIKINOMICS Describes how mass collaboration and open systems are reinventing the way businesses communicate, create value, and compete in the new global marketplace. nGenera
18. Only good workers were able to continue working after the first few days. Top 3% of most prolific workers provided over 40% of trusted work. Top 20% of workers provided over 80% of trusted work.
25. GWAP Game played on a computer that serves some purpose for the people setting up the game by harnessing human abilities in an entertaining setting. Usually applied to activities that are almost trivial for humans to perform that have stymied computers.
49. Yahoo! Answers WikiAnswers Askville NowNow Yedda Lycos IQ Live QnA Trulia Voices Wondir RediffQnA Fluther Wis.dm Answerbag Oyogi Dizzay KnowBrainers The Answer Bank PointAsk AllExperts Able2Know AskMe Helpdesk What Should I Say? Simply Explained Ask a Librarian Askeet! look no further Say-so Grupthink
Clip is 3:17 www.tweenbots.comKacieKinzer has done several excursions of “robots” which are autonomous and drive only in straight lines. Destinations information and a request for help getting the robot there are on the flag.
Presentation is about the emerging model of using the “CROWD” for commerce and social good.Cloud SourcingMicro LaborClick WorkerDigital WorkerCrowdFunding
For example, the public may be invited to develop a new technology, carry out a design task (also known as community-based design[1] anddistributed participatory design), refine or carry out the steps of an algorithm (see human-based computation), or help capture, systematize or analyze large amounts of data (see also citizen science).
SETI is perhaps the first use of crowdsourcing on a large scale. It relied on grid computing technology to enlist the help of 1000’s of people and their idle computers to search for extra terrestrials using a screensaver program. Among the top participants are large numbers who have been participating since the inception in 1999.1,000,000 + PARTICPANTS
Wikipedia is another example of using the crowd to build an encyclopedia through open collaboration and self regulation.
Common uses of cloud labor and the popular sites used to present the workAcknowledging the issues of low wages is important as many people feel this is exploitive.Later we will cover the misuse and abuse occurring with this model.
Perhaps the most well known crowdsourcing model operated by Amazon.com. The Turk, the Mechanical Turk or Automaton Chess Player was a fake chess-playing machineconstructed in the late 18th century. From 1770 until its destruction by fire in 1854, it was exhibited by various owners as an automaton, though it was exposed in the early 1820s as an elaborate hoax.[1]Supports programmatically creating HIT’s thru API’s.
HIT’s focus on tasks requiring human intelligence that are difficult to computerize. Turkers today perform tasks like transcription, image tagging, writing, SEO, and social media activities. There has been lots of criticism related to the relatively low wages page for HIT’s. Began as a tool for searching for missing persons. More on that later.
More on abusingTurkers later
Mobile application related work with ~30,000 handsets participating, currently 421 projectsTesting, usability, etc
Members pay a nominal fee to participate which is offset by earnings for participation in order to increase reliability and overcome UK laws. Members are given a limited number of alerts to use to prevent abuseRewards: A reward of £1000 pounds per month for the Viewer who has made the best contribution to the prevention or detection of a crime.A usage reward for time spent helping the community by monitoring live CCTV footage A reward for recommending a friend Recognition for successful feedback
75,000 clickworkers globally
Clearinghouse or Brokerage of crowdsourcing services
http://blog.crowdflower.com/2010/12/good-work-knows-no-boundaries/Good work knows no boundaries – blog illustrating quality control approach.Only good workers were able to continue working after the first few days.A flood of bad work from specific geographies, related to the spikes in throughput at certain hours.This graph demonstrates a known behavior in online tasks, where many workers attempt only a small amount of work before abandoning a given task. Our quality-control mechanism requires workers to demonstrate accuracy before it accepts their work.Focusing on the top 20 percent of most prolific workers, we see that one-half came from India while another one-third came from the U.S. Other countries provided the remaining workers. While it is true that the vast majority of untrusted workers in this job, who collectively provided relatively few judgments, came from India, it is also true that the country’s workers make up half of the most prolific workers and provided two-thirds of all trusted work.The solution to improving the efficiency of this job, then, is not the crude choice of excluding workers from certain geographies. Rather, we can discourage bad workers by increasing the burden of entry, so that only workers with an interest in completing more than a few judgments will bother with the job.
Form processing: Microtask offers a cost-efficient, scalable and reliable way to integrate high volumes of hand-written forms directly into your existing database.Archive digitization: We offer a cost-efficient way to refine archive material. We use distributed human intelligence for advanced multilingual text recognition, structural analysis and assigning keywords.Able to parse a single task so no one worker can see all of a person’s sensitive data to protect privacy and security
Video 2:37MIT project
The movie “The Age of Stupid” used crowdfunding and raised $1.2M selling shares to ~620+ ordinary people People’s Premiere which sold “Web Screening” rights on ability to pay allowing all profits to be retained to “Inconvenient Truth with Peronality”
These tasks can include labelling images to improve web searching, transcription of ancient text (where OCR software faces a script they are not optimized for and degraded or damaged images) and any activity requiring common sense or human experience.
http://funsat.eecs.umich.edu/Solves many complex practical problems from various domains reduce to SAT (bolean functions): logic synthesis, manufacturing test generation, model checking, circuit routing, equivalence checking, software verification and so on. Satisfiability is the problem of determining if the variables of a given Boolean formula can be assigned in such a way as to make the formula evaluate to TRUE. Equally important is to determine whether no such assignments exist, which would imply that the function expressed by the formula is identically FALSE for all possible variable assignmentsRulesFunSAT provides a graphical game representation for Boolean Satisfiability (SAT) problems in conjunctive normal form.Click the rectangular buttons to change the colors of the bubbles in the board. The buttons are 3-state: GRAY is unassigned, YELLOW is false, BLUE is true.Goal: Turn all bubbles GREEN. For a bubble to turn green, at least one of the literals in the corresponding clause must be true. If all are false, the bubble will turn RED; otherwise, it will be GRAY.When bubbles are gray, the shade of gray is suggestive of many literals are still unassigned in that clause: the more the unassigned literals the literal the shade of gray.Holding down a right click on buttons and bubbles highlights dependencies. BLUE highlighting indicates a direct relationship between clause and variable; YELLOW highlighting indicates a relationship between a clause and the complement of the variable. You can also see the highlighting by hovering over bubbles and buttons if you select 'Highlight on Hover' at the bottom of the screen.
Cargengie MellonGames With A Purpose
ESP Game – partners look at same image and type words until they match based on what they see without using taboo words.
Squigl – partners trace objects and compare results for percentage of match to earn points
Open Challenges connect seekers with solvers to address needs of creative, technical or human capacity problems. Solvers can work alone or in collaboration groups that are formal or organically formed.Saves on time and costs and often produces better results than limiting to ones own employees.In all systems there are mechanisms to set up profiles of your skills, interests and history or participation which are used to produce a reputation score. The history and reputation are then used by recommendation engines to suggest other challenges or activities.
Can choose filters by categories or nature of the challenges. Ideation, theoretical etc…
Most sites require just a few clicks to get started posting challenges or to respond to them.
Open Innovation and Open Challenges have been adopted for social causes and use by non-profits and governments.
1SKYbecame a collaborative national campaign for strong federal action to tackle global climate change and invest in building the clean energy economy of the future. Now one of the largest national climate campaigns in the country, 1Sky works to combine the force of 643 allied organizations, 203,500 committed climate advocates, 4,256 volunteer leaders in 50 states, and our own experienced team to effect change in the nation's capital.
TheExtraordinaries, started by the founder of 1SKY.comJust a couple clicks and your are able to submit requests or to offer assistance
Non-profit for digital work to marginalized workersSamaguardImage and Text Content ModerationSamascribeText and Numerical Data Entry and Audio/Video TranscriptionSamaproofData Mining, Enrichment, and Business Listing Verification
CrowdVoice is a user-powered service that tracks voices of protest from around the world. Raise your voice for causes you support with information you submit.
Women’s Rights in Iraq
KIVA.org combines microlending with crowdfunding for social purposes. Choose sectors, gender and other param’s to search for people to lend to.Kiva's mission is to connect people, through lending, for the sake of alleviating poverty.Kiva empowers individuals to lend to an entrepreneur across the globe. By combining microfinance with the internet, Kiva is creating a global community of people connected through lending.
Open Challenges connect seekers with solvers to address needs of creative, technical or human capacity problems.Challenges can be Creative, technical or scientific. Can be ideation or solutions.Solvers can work alone or in collaboration groups that are formal or organically formed.
Other Free Q&A sitesPay sites also exist as do specialty sitesFaceBook coming online with Q&A as well
$0.50 to $0.65 is common low end rates for Facebook or Twitter related actions with premiums.
Quora Q&A contributor using Mturk to pay people to “Up Vote” his contributions.
Mechanical Turk abuses to elevate (spam) social media metrics on facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Yelp, and othersMany pay the most per HIT but often don’t end up paying. Challenging Amazon to police Mturk.
In total, 757 out of the 1733 new requesters posted at least a one spam HIT, and 552 accounts were posting only spam HITs. 56.46% of the new requesters post no spam HITs. This nice separation indicates that it is easy to separate spam requesters from legitimate ones. There are not that many requesters that post both spam HITs and legitimate ones.
Advise for those considering a career as a clickworker: set up dedicated persona’s with separate accoutns for them and perhaps even separate ones for each site you work with.