Building crowdsourcing applications

Building crowdsourcing applications Simon Willison - simonwillison.net - @simonw @media - 9th June 2010

Crowdsourcing? Let me just cop to the fact that “crowdsourcing” is a stupid buzzword. But like “blog” before it, sometimes it’s the stupid term that sticks. For my purposes, it means collaborating with the people who used to be the silent audience to make something better than you could make alone. - Derek Powazek http://powazek.com/posts/2443

Accuracy Game mechanics Psychology Real-time Copywriting Usability Crowdsourcing Visual design Incentives Moderation Ethics Write-heavy Competition Statistics Legal liability

Examples

OpenStreetMap

Google Image Labeler

ScenicOrNot

XKCD colour survey

Crowdsourcing at the Guardian

The Blair Rich Project

MP’s expenses v1 http://mps-expenses.guardian.co.uk/

Background June 2009 450,000 pages of expenses documents released “Transparency” = dodgy scanned PDFs One week notice - so one week to build it!

Stuff that worked The progress bar Photos of the MPs Releasing a small group of documents at ﬁrst Score boards (once we ﬁnally added them) Especially the “top in last 48 hours” one

Stuff that didn't Releasing everything else at once Asking the wrong questions Line items! Too much time ﬁghting scalability ﬁres Reporting tools were 24 hours too late

Contributors total users date

Votes per user users number of votes cast

MP’s expenses v2 http://mps-expenses2.guardian.co.uk/

Background December 2009 Smaller number of documents One weeks notice (again) Opportunity to learn from our earlier mistakes

Goals Find stuff our journalists cared about Less boring data entry Data coming out again from the start Visible rewards for contributors More digestible tasks Better sense of activity by other people

Lessons learned Use Redis for random selections, not MySQL Assignments made a huge improvement The most important logic in a crowdsourcing system is the next thing to review button “Oldest ﬁrst” pagination is critical

WildlifeNearYou.com

/dev/fort

Where’s my nearest llama?

Lessons learned Be ﬂexible: your users may not share your precise goals Optimise for the fat head of your user base Expose recent activity to site staff Users will do almost anything for a medal!

Final thoughts Don’t be afraid: even ﬂawed crowdsourcing systems produce fascinating results Think hard about the questions you ask Have a minimal barrier to entry Get the next task logic right. Seriously.

Thank you http://simonwillison.net/ http://twitter.com/simonw http://simonwillison.net/tags/crowdsourcing/

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Building crowdsourcing applications

by Simon Willison

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