[okfn-labs] Crowdcrafting + reference lists = crowdsource lists of stuff?

Fri Feb 22 08:57:41 UTC 2013

Hmm, an intriguing topic.

Situations can vary greatly, and therefore so can needs.

E.g.: I want to make a list of all organisations which are helping animals
in Bulgaria. Do I:
1/ search for a government-authored resource?
    -- probably going to be out-of-date, especially if it has any contact
info (it's correct at registration but there's no pressing reason why it
would've been updated as time progressed.. AFAIK)
    -- that is, if I can find anything at all

2/ use mechanical turk - heh, heh :). Nope. (Sorry, just my gut reaction.)
    -- can I target people by location in m. turk? (There's no point in
having US-based m. turks fishing in Google for whatever they can find in
English. I'm unlikely to get good suggestions for getting the information -
they have to move on to the next task, most don't care about my project.)

3/ use CrowdCrafting: I have to find volunteers (I have none atm since I
haven't started this project yet). True, but I'm also going to build
contacts and relationships with people interested in the subject matter.
(E.g. I could start by asking a few of those that I do know of to share a
nicely worded question + URL with those *they* know.)

4/ use a simple form on the web and share that instead of using
CrowdCrafting.
    -- it depends on how easy it would be to use CrowdCrafting.
    -- How quickly can I write a new app (reusing an example perhaps)?
    -- Can I do localisation (*some* of my target volunteers may only know
"button English" :) - "Like", "Add", "Delete" etc. but not much else.)
    -- same "benefits" of finding motivated people as in 3/
    -- maybe there is a level of complexity that has to be reached before
there's much point in CrowdCrafting the crowdsourcing. For a simple
catalogue like this: I could just a form with "Name", "Contact info
(facebook, phone, www, whatever)", "add field" and dump submissions into
e.g. elasticsearch to handle the semi-structured data.

Now, there is another characteristic that this particular problem has, and
that is that the gov't ain't gonna know about all animal help
organisations... because they're not all registered. My two personal
favourites atm are just "community"-type pages on Facebook with a public
google spreadsheet for budget, started/maintained just by .. some random
citizens :). Who don't feel the need to make an NGO.

I want these especially badly since they could use even more help and have
no administrative costs whatsoever (all donations literally go towards
w/ever case you're donating for - they volunteer their time and if they can
afford, petrol). So obviously crowdsourcing this is the way to go. I
realise that this is quite a specific example, yet that's the point - even
in the constrained world of "make a list of things", there are differences
:).

So for some lists, CrowdCrafting would be good, for some an authoritative
source would be necessary... the question for me is, how do I easily decide
which one it will be for each case.

Greetings,
Emanuil
On 22 February 2013 07:48, Daniel Lombraña González <teleyinex at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> PyBossa is a tool that could be used for this problem quite easily,
> however, as some of you have said, it could be or not the solution for the
> problem, you know: no free lunch theorem<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_free_lunch_theorem>
> .
>
>
> In any case, let me share my thoughts on regarding what you have
> said. Friedrich raised the point that he preferred a "one neat
> authoritative source" rather than "everyone's opinion", which in several
> cases is desirable but that could lead to some "problems" obviously
> regarding the nature of the project but just to discuss a real case:
> compare Nupedia, more recently Knol and Wikipedia. The two first ones tried
> the approach of "authoritative source" and in both cases the projects
> failed, while Wikipedia stills here :-) Obviously, while this is not a
> "law" it is something to think about why some projects do not actually take
> off when you need to involve only experts or when you allow several people
> working together.
>
> Tom raised the point that using CrowdCrafting will have the drawback of
> not having a crowd behind the project, and that you will need to engage
> with volunteers. He is right, but I think it will not difficult to engage
> with people that actually care about your project as Jonathan has said.
> Actually, in CrowdCrafting we have seen one project that was created and
> completed really fast: http://crowdcrafting.org/app/heradsdomar/. The
> creator could do what Tom said, go to Mechanical Turk or another service
> and pay for it, but he used CrowdCrafting instead, and it solved his
> problem. In other words, CrowdCrafting is about * intrinsic motivation*,
> while Mechanical Turk and projects use money to get things done. IMHO this
> is a really important aspect about CrowdCrafting, and I think so, because
> I've seen many projects actually benefiting from intrinsic motivation. For
> giving you an example, let me share with you this quote from Mary
> Poppendieck's Team Compensation<http://www.poppendieck.com/pdfs/Compensation.pdf>(pdf) that I found in a Jeff Atwood blog post:
>
> There are two approaches to giving children allowances. Theory A says that
>> children should earn their allowances; money is exchanged for work. Theory
>> B says that children should contribute to the household without being paid,
>> so allowances are not considered exchange for work. I know one father who
>> was raised with Theory B but switched to Theory A for his children. He put
>> a price on each job and paid the children weekly for the jobs they had
>> done. This worked for a while, but then the kids discovered that they could
>> choose among the jobs and avoid doing the ones they disliked. When the
>> children were old enough to earn their own paychecks, they stopped doing
>> household chores altogether, and the father found himself mowing the lawn
>> alongside his neighbors' teenage children.
>>
>> Were he to do it again, this father says he would not tie allowance to
>> work.
>>
>> In the same way, once employees get used to receiving financial rewards
>> for meeting goals, they begin to work for the rewards, not the intrinsic
>> motivation that comes from doing a good job and helping their company be
>> successful. *Many studies have shown that extrinsic rewards like grades
>> and pay will, over time, destroy the intrinsic reward that comes from the
>> work itself.*
>>
>
> In summary, PyBossa will not solve all the problems, but if you think that
> your project could be solved using some humans, then, you can think of it
> as an alternative to Mechanical Turk and similar tools using intrinsic
> motivation as the driving force.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Daniel
>
> PS: If you have time, read this blog post about Mechanical Turk from Jeff
> Atwood
> http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/04/is-amazons-mechanical-turk-a-failure.html
>
>
> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 7:16 PM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:
>
>> Thanks Tom. I don't think that organising users would be an issue, as
>> we'd likely be looking at fairly small tasks - usually related to projects
>> 'with a cause' (like investigating climate denial groups). Part of the
>> point would be to find a way to engage people around these projects, not to
>> use existing mechanical turk projects to pay people.
>>
>> My point was less about the specific case of finding Twitter handles but
>> more whether PyBossa could be generalised to deal with something that I
>> feel might be a recurring problem.
>>
>> Just a thought!
>>
>>
>> On 21 February 2013 18:47, Tom Morris <tfmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 10:26 AM, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org>wrote:
>>>
>>>> Agreed that canonical reference data should be authoritative rather
>>>> than opinion based. ;-)
>>>>
>>>> I'm talking more about using standard reference lists (e.g. counties in
>>>> the world, cities or counties in the UK) to then generate new lists which
>>>> may not be 'reference data' per se - like 'Twitter account for every local
>>>> education authority' or 'URL of national contact point for multinational
>>>> corporation X'.
>>>>
>>>> Generally this would be a way to get a piece (or several pieces) of
>>>> data for every item you had on a given list. A recent use case would be
>>>> wanting to get the Twitter accounts for a given list of climate change
>>>> denial think tanks [1].
>>>>
>>>> What do you think? Useful/not useful? Perhaps Google Docs is the
>>>> easiest and best way to do this for now?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Microtask sites are used for this kind of work all the time and you can
>>> get it done pretty cheaply.  In additional to Twitter accounts, people use
>>> this technique for lists of home pages, customer service phone numbers,
>>> etc, etc.  The disadvantage to using Crowdcrafting specifically is that it
>>> has no user base, so you'd need to organize your own volunteers, whereas if
>>> you used Mechanical Turk, Crowdflower, etc you'd have a waiting army of
>>> people to do your work.  You would need to pay them, but only pennies.
>>>
>>> For your specific task of finding Twitter handles for organizations, I'd
>>> first see if I could get a list of home page URLs using Freebase, DBpedia,
>>> or Wikipedia and then set a scraper running on that list of URLs to see how
>>> many Twitter handles I could scrape automatically.
>>>
>>> Tom
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Jonathan Gray <http://jonathangray.org/> | @jwyg<http://twitter.com/jwyg>
>> Director of Policy and Ideas
>> The Open Knowledge Foundation <http://okfn.org/> | @okfn<http://twitter.com/okfn>
>> Support our work: okfn.org/support
>>
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>
>
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