WASSIC Crowdsourcing

GAIA RESOURCES
Crowdsourcing
What are the risks and opportunities for spatial practitioners?
Piers Higgs
Gaia Resources
Presented at WASSIC 2011, 21st June, 2011

OVERVIEW
Topics covered in this session
Crowdsourcing
Citizen science
Social media
What are the risks?
What are the opportunities?

CROWDSOURCING
What is Crowdsourcing?
or
?

CROWDSOURCING
Oxford English Dictionary:
“the practice whereby an organisation enlists a number of freelancers, paid or unpaid, to work on a specific task or problem”
Wikipedia:
“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”

CROWDSOURCING
In 1858, the Phililogical Societyagreed to create a new dictionary
Volunteer readers were assigned books, and then created quotation slips from them
These were compiled into the firstcomprehensive OED in 1928

CROWDSOURCING
Since 1998, the Birds Australia “Atlas”project has been gathering information about the state ofbirds in Australia
7,000+ people, 420,000+ surveys and over 7.1 million bird records
These have then been reviewed and analysed into the Atlas books, and into a wide range of other material and research

CROWDSOURCING

CROWDSOURCING
What models of Crowdsourcing are used?
Crowdsourcing
Crowdfunding
Crowdvoting
Crowdcreation
Crowd wisdom

CROWDSOURCING
Spatial Crowdsourcing?

CROWDSOURCING
What is Crowdsourcing doing?
Crowdsourcing
Design tasks
Tune Algorithm
Provide Data
Citizen Science

CROWDSOURCING
What is Citizen Science?

CROWDSOURCING
What is Citizen Science?
No exact results found for “citizen science” in the dictionary.
Wikipedia:
“a term used for projects or ongoing program of scientific work in which individual volunteers or networks of volunteers, many of whom may have no specific scientific training, perform or manage research-related tasks such as observation, measurement or computation.”

CROWDSOURCING
What’s our experience?
Working with the Atlas of Living Australia,which has funding to June 2012
Mission:
“To develop an authoritative, freely accessible distributed and federated biodiversity data management system”
Working in a range of areas to deliver this, all around the ALA web site
www.ala.org.au

CROWDSOURCING

CROWDSOURCING
Developing flexible, open source web-based (and mobile-compatible) software that will enable a wide range of parties to record and manage records of Australian biodiversity
Software is called the Biological Data Recording System, and has been in development for close to a year.

CROWDSOURCING
Spatial Citizen Science?
Biological Data Recording System

CROWDSOURCING
Climatewatch – recording on climate effects on species

CROWDSOURCING
Safecast.org

CROWDSOURCING
What is Social Media?

CROWDSOURCING
What is Social Media?
Cannot search without a login and paid account now…
Wikipedia:
“Social media is the use of web-based and mobile technologies to turn communication into interactive dialogue.”

CROWDSOURCING
Spatial Social Media?
Twitter with locations?

CROWDSOURCING
Lists and updates

CROWDSOURCING
Facebook connections

CROWDSOURCING
Crowdsourcing, Citizen Science and Social Media
Social Media
Crowdsourcing
Citizen
Science

CROWDSOURCING
Risks and Opportunities

CROWDSOURCING
Risks and Opportunities
Five areas of risk and opportunity:
Intellectual Property & Copyright
Software
Hardware
Workforce
Data

CROWDSOURCING
Workforce
There are no resource constraints
Opportunity

CROWDSOURCING
Workforce
Not everyone is the same
Risk

CROWDSOURCING
Workforce
Listen to the people who are going to use the tools

CROWDSOURCING
Software
Two things that really engage internet users (Nielsen)
In the US: 1,500 million hours a month online doing one of these two things
25% of total internet use

CROWDSOURCING
Software
Online games have certain characteristics…
Use an experience system
Multiple long & short term aims
Reward effort
Rapid feedback
Uncertainty
Windows of enhanced attention
Other people
http://tinyurl.com/28mvx7v

CROWDSOURCING
Opportunity
Software
Some of the most successful crowdsourcing methods include both…
Sells advertising, gets micropayments, broadcasts on
social media
Science based, with experience
systems in place, with
infrastructure from research
institutions.

CROWDSOURCING
Software
Form interfaces need to be robust

CROWDSOURCING
Software
Mapping interfaces can be hard to explain
Search?

CROWDSOURCING
Risk
Data
Co-ordinates are hard, even for pros

CROWDSOURCING
Data
Birds Australia Carnaby’s Cockatoo Project
1,217 users
4,706 records
16 months

CROWDSOURCING
Data
You can’t rely onon-board devicesto be completely accurate at all times
We found not only location issues,but also compassissues

CROWDSOURCING
Opportunity
Data
Some can be checked via distribution maps
But there are valid range extensions, or there are inaccuracies within the known range

CROWDSOURCING
Risk
Data
Have some means to check data

CROWDSOURCING
Risk
Hardware
Mobile devices make this even more interesting

CROWDSOURCING
Opportunity
Hardware
Make the design intuitive and easy to use

CROWDSOURCING
% of Smartphone sales by OS April – June 2009
% of Smartphone sales by OS April – June 2010
Hardware
What phones are they using?
40,972,000 handsets sold
61,649,000 handsets sold

CROWDSOURCING
Opportunity
Hardware
What other technology is coming?

CROWDSOURCING
Copyright and Intelletual Property
Intellectual Property and Copyright is still a bit of a grey area
Who owns a recordthat is entered to acitizen science project?
Can you even “own”a piece of data?
Risk
Risk
Risk
Risk
Risk
Risk
Risk

CROWDSOURCING
Copyright and Intelletual Property
But some of these issues can be dealt with through the use of creative commons licencing
In other states of Australia, Freedomof Information is being replaced byRight to Information
Australian Governments Open Access and Licensing Frameworkwww.ausgoal.gov.au
Opportunity

CROWDSOURCING
Risks?
An inexhaustible supply of garbage?
A way to alienate people?
A source of rubbish data?
A way to lose money?
A way to lose quite a bit of money?
Yes!

CROWDSOURCING
Opportunities?
An inexhaustible supply of labour?
A way to engage with people?
A source of free data?
A way to save money?
A way to get money?
Yes!

CROWDSOURCING
On balance?
Crowdsourcing has the potential to be of great use to the spatial industry
There are lots of opportunities, and the risks are mitigatable

CROWDSOURCING
Questions?
If you want to know more, please contact me
piers@gaiaresources.com.au
(08) 9227 7309
0411 754 006
Web site:
www.gaiaresources.com.au

WASSIC Crowdsourcing

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