Building crowdsourcing applications
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A talk on my experiences building crowdsourcing applications, both at the Guardian newspaper and for my own personal projects. Presented at Web Directions @media 2010 on June 9th.
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Building crowdsourcing applications
- 1. Building crowdsourcing applications Simon Willison - simonwillison.net - @simonw @media - 9th June 2010
- 4. 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
- 5. Accuracy Game mechanics Psychology Real-time Copywriting Usability Crowdsourcing Visual design Incentives Moderation Ethics Write-heavy Competition Statistics Legal liability
- 6. Accuracy Game mechanics Psychology Real-time Copywriting Usability Crowdsourcing Visual design Incentives Moderation Ethics Write-heavy Competition Statistics Legal liability
- 7. Accuracy Game mechanics Psychology Real-time Copywriting Usability Crowdsourcing Visual design Incentives Moderation Ethics Write-heavy Competition Statistics Legal liability
- 8. Accuracy Game mechanics Psychology Real-time Copywriting Usability Crowdsourcing Visual design Incentives Moderation Ethics Write-heavy Competition Statistics Legal liability
- 9. Accuracy Game mechanics Psychology Real-time Copywriting Usability Crowdsourcing Visual design Incentives Moderation Ethics Write-heavy Competition Statistics Legal liability
- 10. Accuracy Game mechanics Psychology Real-time Copywriting Usability Crowdsourcing Visual design Incentives Moderation Ethics Write-heavy Competition Statistics Legal liability
- 11. Examples
- 12. OpenStreetMap
- 20. ScenicOrNot
- 29. Crowdsourcing at the Guardian
- 35. Background June 2009 450,000 pages of expenses documents released “Transparency” = dodgy scanned PDFs One week notice - so one week to build it!
- 42. 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
- 43. 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
- 44. Contributors total users date
- 45. Votes per user users number of votes cast
- 47. Background December 2009 Smaller number of documents One weeks notice (again) Opportunity to learn from our earlier mistakes
- 48. 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
- 56. 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
- 58. /dev/fort
- 69. 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!
- 70. 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.