Crowdsourcing

Guest authors
Ida Hakola
Ida is looking at the web world from the content point of view. Her past involves
journalism, multitasking between different media and a lot of traveling. Being
the founding partner and CEO of the start-up content agency Vapa Media has
brought a whole lot of content in Ida’s life.
vapamedia.fi
Esko Kilpi
Esko is an internationally renowned expert on knowledge based organizations
and digital work. His interests relate to the complex dynamics of networked value
creation. He is an executive advisor for both public sector organizations and
leading multinational companies.
Dr Vili Lehdonvirta
Dr Vili Lehdonvirta is a Visiting Fellow at the Asia Research Centre at London
School of Economics and an Adjunct Professor of Economic Sociology at the
University of Turku. He advises the World Bank’s infoDev program and startup
companies around the world on virtual economies, digital labor and ICT4D. He
is currently on leave from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and
has previously held visiting positions at the University of Tokyo and Waseda
University. Lehdonvirta has a PhD in Economic Sociology from Turku School of
Economics and an MSc (Tech) from Helsinki University of Technology.
vili.lehdonvirta.com
Dr Hannu I. Miettinen
Formerly a research scientist, Hannu is now involved in developing new
technologies for tasks that computers struggle with. He has a lifelong interest in
promoting excellence in science and technology, and has written popular articles
about science for 30 years.
bit.ly/If98Gv
Jani Penttinen
Jani Penttinen is a founder and CEO of Transfluent, a service that helps brands
connect with their fans in any language, and Xiha, a multilingual social network
with users in more than 200 countries speaking 140 languages. He blogs at
janipenttinen.com.
Katri Saarikivi
Katri is interested in discovering new ways that psychology can help people.
This has led her to work in organizational psychology with a couple of detours
into clinical positions. She is currently working as a researcher in cognitive
neuroscience.
Copyright © Microtask 2012
Tampere
Contents
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9
Crowdsourcing
Death 2.0: Crowdsourcing the rest of your (after)life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
How to lose friends and predict epidemics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15
Crowdsourcing vs privacy: do we know too much? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18
The land that time forgot: How crowdsourcing can help bring Cuba
into the 21st Century. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21
Crowdsource a country clean? Yes we can. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Winner takes it all?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25
Riot in a crowded street. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28
Adventures in Primetime. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30
Human Flesh Search Engines: The Most Dangerous Game . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32
The Italian Job . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 34
Crowdsourcing: an ancient Finnish tradition?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37
Crowdsourcing and machine translation: the start of a beautiful friendship . . . 39
Bringing anarchy to the creative process – When distributed
work meets interesting web content. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41
Speaking in tongues: how the crowd is transforming translation. . . . . . . . . . . . . 43
Transfluent: tweeting in tongues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46
Banking on one another: Can the crowd save itself from the banks?. . . . . . . . . . 48
Confidence tricks: can crowdsourcing keep our feet on the ground? . . . . . . . . . . 50
Crowded planet: desperately seeking sustainability. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52
Apocalypse Now-ish: can crowdsourcing save us from 2012?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54
The Pursuit of Crowdsourcing: Iceland’s constitutional saga. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56
Distributed work and data security: can the crowd keep a secret?. . . . . . . . . . . . 57
Crowdsourcing global development: working theories . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 60
War Games (or how the US military learned to love the crowd). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
Crowd funding: a monumental achievement. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65
Grandma knows best: experiments in distributed education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Crowdsourcing Crime Part I: The Good Guys. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69
Crowdsourcing crime part II: the net has eyes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71
Caught on Camera: the crowd calls the shots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
Making news pay: a pressing issue. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75
How many microtasks does it take to change the world? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77
Shining a light on local government. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
Gamification
Heather Chaplin: gamification’s worst nightmare? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
Gaming the system: how rewards affect performance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
Science and the “Nobel” art of gaming. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87
A ticket to play. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89
Revenge of the gamers: an epic win for the world . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91
Why making the crowd smart is a no-brainer. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
Play the game of life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95
When worlds collide. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98
The Future of Work: Paid to Play?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 102
Some work is born digital: from gold farmers to game masters. . . . . . . . . . . . . 104
Getting paid to party: what is the difference between work and play?. . . . . . . . 108
MOG: the day the music gamified. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
Rookie or real player? The rise of Seth Priebatsch. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113
Down on MyFarm: gamification goes rural. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115
Science fun: the protein shake that makes you a genius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117
Teaching kids to win. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119
Microwork
Lost in the Virtual Economy? Here’s a map . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
Digitalkoot: crowdsourcing Finnish Cultural Heritage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
The secrets of Digitalkoot: Lessons learned crowdsourcing
data entry to 50,000 people (for free) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129
Are the Golden Years history?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132
Work could heal the mind: microtasking from a cognitive perspective. . . . . . . . 135
Task-work in global networks. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139
Happily ever after: how bored workers and their bosses can
benefit from crowdsourcing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141
Crime-sourcing: the dark side of the crowd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Google Ngrams: in the beginning was the word search. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147
Ancient Lives: crowdsourcing makes history (but will it last?). . . . . . . . . . . . . . 149
Journalist vs. microworker: a fair fight? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151
Twitter Predictions: the future is just 140 characters away. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
VizWiz: what the crowd sees is what you get. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155
A (cryptic) case for the crowd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157
Africa online 2011: The mobile continent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Language Lessons: translating the global conversation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Crowds against the Machine: will digital workers soon be digitized?. . . . . . . . . 164
7
Acknowledgments
Short Stories about Tiny Tasks – as you will have hopefully guessed
by now – is all about crowdsourcing, microtasks and gamification.
But make no mistake: putting the book together was no small task. It
was only possible with a lot of help from a sizeable crowd of people.
First of all, we would like to thank Harry Seppälä for his work on
the cover of the book and the illustrations throughout. If you like the
company’s vintage visual identity and our mascot - the Microtask
Guy – Harry deserves all the honors.
Deepest gratitude also goes to the Tech, Sales and Management
Teams: without you we wouldn’t have much to brag about (and no
one in the crowdsourcing scene would be listening to us anyway).
Special thanks to our investors, for believing that the future of
work will be micro. We are doing our best to make it happen.
Many thanks also to Roisto: they deserve a prize for the patience
shown while modifying the book layout until we were completely,
absolutely, definitively happy (breathe a sigh of relief guys, the book
is finally done).
Eternal respect goes to Zebrablogs for their help writing, rewriting and editing all the content in this book. Short Stories about Tiny
Tasks wouldn’t be half as cool without their input.
And finally a huge pat on the back goes to all our readers and guest
bloggers: we wouldn’t be still writing - two and a half years after we
started the blog - without your ideas, comments and support.
8
9
Introduction
In late 2009 when we launched the Microtask blog¹, the crowdsourcing industry as we know it was in its infancy – if it even existed
at all. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk had been busy for a few years, but
that was about the extent of it. Even Google had little to say on the
subject. Back then most people were more interested in Avatar and
Susan Boyle than crowdsurfing, or whatever it was they thought we
were talking about.
Into this void we cast our ideas on our fledgling industry. Along
with our posts, we invited guests to share their thoughts and always
welcomed comments. Wherever possible we tried to bring something new and original to an internet full of regurgitated content. We
wanted to create a forum that would engage the growing number of
people interested in crowdsourcing, stimulate constructive debate,
promote our new company and generally make us look cool.
Fast forward many thousands of words to mid 2012. A lot has
changed. While Susan Boyle is probably still cooler than us, the
crowdsourcing industry’s growth has exceeded even our optimistic
expectations.
As we intended, the Microtask blog has documented this rise and
rise of crowdsourcing. While we have tried to be a fairly impartial
witness to the state of the industry and its most exciting players,
we will admit to a certain bias when trumpeting our own achievements (which is a nice excuse for me to bring them up again): To
date Digitalkoot, our project with the National Library of Finland to
accurately digitize old Finish newspapers, has enlisted the help of
over 100,000 volunteers to complete almost 7 million tasks; while
in 2011 we won Red Herring’s 2011 Global 100 award, joining the
illustrious ranks of earlier winners which includes Google, Skype,
Salesforce.com, YouTube and eBay.
10
Today there are more companies involved in some form of crowdsourcing than we can count. The mainstream media love us, mentioning crowdsourcing at every opportunity. Many people (mainly
us) say our industry played an instrumental role in the Arab Spring
uprisings. Merriam-Webster even defines the term. (For your information, it’s “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or
content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and
especially from the online community.”)
In fact, if anything, the term “crowdsourcing” is now an overexposed buzzword. For this reason, we have sought to use the blog –
along with other forums – to promote a more useful set of definitions
to describe the processes that “crowdsourcing” now encompasses.
To help you make sense of this book amidst this confusion, the blogs
reproduced here have been separated into three areas: gamification
(which is all about making something like work seem like a game),
microtasks (the crowdsourcing of tiny tasks that can be completed in
seconds) and more general crowdsourcing themed posts (i.e. everything else).
While we don’t expect this book to make it to the number #1 spot
on Oprah’s book club (this would be acceptable, however), we hope it
will provide some sort of a reference point for the early development
of one of today’s most exciting industries. Either that or provide a
good door stop for you. Whichever it is, we here at Microtask hope
you enjoy it.
For ongoing discussion on crowdsourcing, and what the future
holds, check out our website once or twice a week. We always manage to find something to say.
1. Microtask blog - blog.microtask.com
11
12
Design by: Elliot B
Design by: Dorothy
Design by: Tim
Design by: Nicholas
Design by: Martin
Design by: Ben
Design by: Suzy
Design by: Samantha Z
Design by: Eddie
Design by: Jonathan
Design by: Girrish
Design by: Jack the man
Design by: Bartholomew
Design by: Steve
Design by: Suzan
Design by: Ray
Design by: Sam
Design by: Sanjay
13
September 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Death 2.0: Crowdsourcing
the rest of your (after)life
Years before Twitter and Farmville took over our lives, philosophers
were worried that computers were changing the nature of human
existence. (Yes, I watched The Matrix again on the weekend.) With
the rise of social media, this idea has now gone a step further: can
computers change what it means to be dead?
A few weeks ago, while watching TED videos to escape the
scorching Italian sun (it’s a tough life, I know), I came across this
off-beat and slightly creepy talk¹ by Adam Ostrow, Mashable’s
Editor in Chief.
Adam’s subject was our online (im)mortality. These days people
are constantly uploading stuff: social networking profiles, tweets and
even humble blogs. Long-term, this means we’re all creating virtual
“life-journals” that will, eventually, outlive us. Unable to ignore this
disturbing thought, Adam began to explore the weird and wonderful
world of post-mortem posting.
Things to do in cyberspace when you’re dead
One of Adam’s first discoveries was if i die², with the site slogan:
write it down, just in case. Basically, it’s an app which lets you compose your own final Facebook status. You give this “ultimate update”
to three trusted (non-drinking) friends who post it after you’ve
finally gone to the big app store in the sky.
For people who want more order in their afterlives there’s
1000memories³, a free site that creates “an online shareable
space” where people can publish and discuss photos of departed
loved-ones. Or, for military enthusiasts there’s Fold3⁴, which
memorializes the lives of soldiers. It’s slogan: Their Lives, Our
History (inexplicably Fold3 rejected TechCrunch’s⁵ way cooler
tagline: a place for dead people).
14
Ways to tweet forever
Following the “virtual afterlife” meme to its logical conclusion, Adam
Ostrow ends his talk by discussing the possibility of converting a person’s entire “online archive” into a kind of immortal social media avatar. This “entity” could continue updating for you even after your physical death. It’s a bizarre but compelling concept and, technologically
speaking, could soon be possible. Recently, there have been endless
projects combining human and artificial intelligence – could the same
thing work here? Imagine the crowd checking machine-produced
“beyond the grave” posts to make sure they sound human enough.
Meanwhile, over at MIT, scientists are now designing robots
capable of displaying human emotions. How long before we can
make them look, walk and talk like our loved ones? I’m personally
torn over this idea. On the one hand I could have my own personal
Louis C.K-bot doing hilarious routines while washing the dishes. On
the other hand, the whole area is so ethically problematic it makes
gay marriage in the Vatican look non-controversial. What if someone
makes an army of hate-spreading virtual fascists? Or a modern day
Romeo becomes obsessed with a simulacra of his dead girlfriend?
Should we go down this route at all? Sci-Fi writers from Isaac
Asimov to William Gibson have all struggled with the same question. It’s terrible, freaky and fascinating: exactly the kind of idea that
refuses to die. Thoughts anyone? (Remember to think your comments through first: they may just outlive you).
1. Adam Ostrow - After Your Final Status Update - TED.com
bit.ly/ozhc6M
2. If I Die - Write it down, just in case.
ifidie.org/
3. 1000 Memories - Bring your past into the present.
1000memories.com/
4. Fold3 - The web’s premier collection of original military records
fold3.com/pages-search/
5. TC50: Footnote, A Social Network To Help Us Remember The Dead
tcrn.ch/h5HeZH
15
October 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
How to lose friends and
predict epidemics
With The Social Network out in cinemas, everyone is talking about
Mark Zuckerberg and his 500 million friends. Seeing as Mark is getting so much attention already, today I would rather talk about his
nemesis, Nicholas Christakis.
While Mark is busy building friendships, Nicholas is destroying them: according to him, if your friend gets fat, the chance of
you getting fat at the same time increases by 57%.¹ Because of
Nicholas, overweight people all over the world dine alone tonight
(crowd goes awwww).
The social network makes us all stars
To be fair to Christakis, his point is not to make you ditch your fattening beer-buddies, but rather show how real social networks influence our health, norms and behavior. To be clear, we are not talking
about virtual networks like Facebook, but those networks humans
have formed for thousands of years, well before the Internet became
our one and only master.
Counting our family, friends and work relationships, we are connected to probably hundreds of people. They in turn are connected
to hundreds of people, some of whom we are connected to and many
of whom we are not. We are all embedded into that vast fabric of
humanity, mutually affecting each other. As a picture, the people in
a social network look a bit like stars in the night sky, all connected to
their neighbors with little lines.
Christakis and his colleague Fowler focus on how the structure of
social networks can help us to predict the spread of epidemics. Their
ideas² apply to any type of social behavior spread by people, including consumer adoption of a product or diffusion of abstract ideas
such as political views.
16
Everything you know is old
Today, the best way to predict epidemics is with labs (or analysis
nodes), which report the incidence of certain conditions to a central
database. One or two weeks later we find out at what stage the epidemic was the day the information was collected.
According to Christakis and Fowler there is a better way.
Epidemics don’t spread randomly amongst a population. If we want
to get an early warning of an epidemic or even forecast it, the key is
to figure out how it travels through the structure of social networks.
In such networks, different people have different numbers of connections. One person might have three friends, while another might
have 100. Curiously, however, two people with the same number
of connections may not be equally important in the spread of an
epidemic. Those individuals who are the stars at the center of the
social galaxy are the key to early detection. Because of their centrality, when these individuals pick up a piece of information, a germ
or a specific behavior, it will quickly spread through the rest of the
population. If you want an early warning of an epidemic, it is much
more effective to monitor these central people than it is to monitor
random people in a population.
Your friends have more friends than you do
Mapping a network, however, is a hard task: it can be expensive,
unethical, or technically unfeasible, not least because these networks
are changing all the time. So how do you find out who are the central
people in a network? Christakis and Fowler came up with a cunning
insight: the friends of randomly chosen people have more connections, and are more central, than the random people themselves. As
the saying goes, your friends have more friends than you do³.
The two researchers tested this theory by observing the behavior
and emails both from random subjects and their friends. They found
that monitoring the friends allowed them to forecast an epidemic 60
days before it hit. The length of this advance warning depends on factors such as the nature of what is spreading and the structure of the
network, but the main point remains: we can predict future events with
amazing accuracy by simply understanding the ties between people.
17
Apart from the fact that it is fascinating, the reason I mention all
these ideas is because of how they can be applied to the concept of
distributed work.
An obvious example is how a crowdsourced group of related volunteers could help us to understand trends faster. More interesting is how these ideas might improve the efficiency of distributed
work. Would adding a social layer to existing crowdsourcing services
(where people are generally unrelated) help forecast the diffusion of
good practices, data and other information throughout a network of
workers?
If you have any thoughts on this subject, please spread them. We
would love to become infected.
1. Nicholas Christakis - The Hidden Influence of Social Networks - TED.com
bit.ly/c8j93o
2. Nicholas Christiakis - How Social Networks Predict Epidemics - TED.com
bit.ly/bMKxW5
3. Satoshi Kanazawa - Why Your Friends Have More Friends Than You Do Psychologytoday.com
bit.ly/4mqXBk
18
April 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Crowdsourcing vs privacy:
do we know too much?
Back in the 1950s, the U.S. writer Louis Kronenberger famously
complained that TV had “given privacy its death blow.”.
The pronouncement turned out to be a little premature. It’s hard
to imagine what Kronenberger would have said about the rise of the
internet (possibly that the web was doing something very nasty to
privacy’s corpse).
60 years on, the battle between privacy and technology shows no
sign of letting up.
The very nature of crowdsourcing means it is often at the forefront
of privacy issues. The last few months have been embarrassingly rich
in privacy-related crowdsourcing disasters. Take Internet Eyes¹,
a crime detection service that uses the crowd to monitor live CCTV
camera feeds. The company has faced a storm of criticism from civil
rights groups, the UK’s Internet Commission, and (ahem) our blog.²
In March, one shopkeeper who installed Internet Eyes got so many
complaints from customers that he left the service a week later.
Playing tag
For many people Internet Eyes seems invasive, Orwellian, and just
plain creepy. However, most online privacy issues are more subtle.
Geotagging is a prime example. 2011 is set to be a breakthrough year
for Geotagging apps, with Facebook Places, Foursquare and Gowalla
all eager to grab the biggest share of the market. But, though it might
be a good way to score cheaper Starbucks, playing with virtual maps
has hidden dangers.
In an earlier blog post³ we discussed how a group of overenthusiastic baseball fans used Foursquare to organize a riot in San
Francisco. Influential blogger Aaron Strout has also voiced his “personal” concerns about Facebook Places, describing the service as “a
privacy nightmare”. What if friends (or enemies) start gaming your
19
location: tagging you in places when you aren’t really there? Imagine
trying to explain to your fiancé why Facebook says you’ve spent all
day at your ex’s apartment?
It’s easy to forget that underneath the innovation and idealism,
the web is basically the world’s most sophisticated billboard. The
more you feed information into Places, the more Facebook can “geotarget” and personalize its ads.
Fanning the flames
For all the talk about personal privacy, human beings are addicted to
gossip. Before language was invented, cavemen probably sat around
grunting and winking about what Fred and Wilma were doing down
in the swamp.
The ultimate mud-rakers are, of course, the paparazzi. Member
of this dubious profession keep the world supplied with an endless
stream of celebrity photos (inspiring shots like “Angelina Jolie buys
milk” and “Justin Bieber checks his watch”). Now, a new iPhone app
for gossip lovers promises to make celebrities’ lives even more overexposed. Says the press release: “All you have to do is take a picture
of a celebrity on your phone using this app and your image will be
instantly submitted from anywhere around the globe to Big Pictures
so that you can make LOADS of INSTANT CASH!”. If I was a famous
soccer player, I’d start worrying about fans with smartphones.
The debate around privacy has been going on for at least the last
60 years – probably much longer. I guess this means there really
are no easy solutions. The question is, how do we encourage crowd
collaboration without creating a frenzied online mob? Plus, as social
networks grow, how do we share data while safeguarding personal
information? Right now, it’s hard to tell whether we’re entering a
new era of openness or just creating a lot of future lawsuits. Let’s just
hope that whatever happens, we don’t all end up living like celebrities: totally without private lives.
1. Internet Eyes - Detecting Crime As It Happens interneteyes.co.uk/
2. Microtask article in this book: Crowdsourcing crime part 2, the net has eyes
3. Microtask article in this book: Riot in a crowded street
20
OFICINA DE
PERMISOS
21
February 2012 by Tommaso De Benetti
The land that time forgot:
How crowdsourcing can
help bring Cuba into the
21st Century
With its beautiful crumbling buildings and vintage motor cars, spicy
culture and rich history, few countries excite the imagination like Cuba.
Over the Christmas break I visited this tiny island that occupies
such a large place in world culture and history. Explaining the country of Castro is probably impossible, but triumphant Socialism or the
white sandy beaches of Varadero are far from the reality. Day-by-day
Cuba revealed itself exciting, surprising and often disappointing.
Paper to the people
One thing that struck me – aside form the complete lack of consumer
choice – was the amount of bureaucracy involved in… pretty much
everything, from getting a seat on a bus to accessing the internet.
As a socialist country Cuba is buried in paperwork (which may
explain the shortage of toilet paper); what makes it crazy is that all
that work is mostly done in vain.
As you might have heard, Cuba is one of those places where the
use of the web is highly regulated. Only few selected people can
obtain a connection (mostly those hosting tourists), and prices are
so prohibitive that even without explicit restrictions, very few locals
could afford one. We are talking prices in the order of 5 times the
average monthly salary for an evening-only dial-up connection, so
not exactly 100MB-per-second optic fiber.
What’s more interesting is that not even official or state-run
activities seem to use any kind of intranet to coordinate their revolutionary efforts. Everything is scribbled on little pieces of paper
that end up in a closet somewhere, forever forgotten. In the whole
22
island I couldn’t find evidence of a single database where data could
be cross-referenced. For a tourist, this means that you don’t know if
the bus coming in 2 hours will have a free seat: you just wait and see.
For Cubans, it probably means a life of unnecessary grind against an
unfriendly and highly inefficient bureaucracy.
Hasta la crowd-victoria
Add these observations to the incredibly high unemployment rate
among all age groups, I came to two conclusions. First: aside from
the obvious goal of granting freedom of speech to all their citizens,
Cuba needs reliable, fast and affordable internet connections at least
as a way to provide its citizens with work. Second: crowdsourcing
could play a big part in this process.
Cuba has a high level of education, so transcriptions from paper
to digital formats could be a bit of a waste of potential in this specific
case. But when the choice is between doing that and hanging around
your front door from dusk till dawn, the decision seems easy. The
concepts of crowd labor and microwork are wide enough to appeal
to people of all ages and educational backgrounds.
Although Cuba is a fascinating country to visit, actually living
there probably isn’t. Ordinary Cubans are crying out for the opportunities most of the world takes for granted. With some decent internet
access, crowdsourcing could help kickstart this process (there is definitely no shortage of paper forms that need transcribing). It could be
the start of a much needed second revolution.
23
February 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Crowdsource a country clean?
Yes we can.
Going on vacation to a beautiful beach can be depressing. No matter
how secluded you are, littering the coastline will be the evidence that
we are trashing our planet.
As global consumption spirals upwards, personal responsibility
seems to be at an all time low. Everyday, millions of plastic bottles
are thrown into our oceans, where they slowly drift into massive
floating garbage patches. The last great virgin rain forests of the
world are disappearing as fast as endangered species lists are growing. Faced with this depressing reality, apathy seems the only logical
solution: one individual cannot make a difference.
Happily, one organization has shown that this is not true: if we all
clean up our act, we can make a difference. Let’s do it!¹ is an Estonian
platform that calls on the crowd to tackle illegal waste. Only 3 years
old, Let’s do it! has achieved some remarkable things. In 2008, it
mobilized 3% of Estonia’s population to clean up 10,000 tons of litter. For free. In one day.
Let’s do it again?
Ahti Heinla, one of the former funders of Skype and now programmer at Let’s do it!, says: “The same action day has been repeated, not
only in Estonia, but in 9 countries – Slovenia, Portugal, Lithuania
and others – with 1.3 million volunteers in total. Everywhere, we
have been able to get most infrastructure and services for free.”
Let’s do it! mobilizes the crowd using a combination of social networks and old-fashioned media campaigning. Basically, the organization will try anything short of summoning Captain Planet to get
people picking up litter. It has worked with charities, banks, national
airlines, celebrities, neighborhoods and even armies (nothing like a
tank to make kids put their gum in the trash). The organization is
also open to working with other crowdsourcing services, such as the
24
crowd management app Groundcrew (discussed previously on the
blog²) “These are great initiatives”, says Ahti, “and could be used to
organize field activity in some of our cleanups”.
A lean, clean machine
As well as direct action, Let’s do it! has created online maps of global
waste hot spots. Map data is obtained by a combination of users
uploading photos and (here’s the science bit) automatic harvesting
of geo-located images from Flickr, Picasa and similar services. The
photos – over 260,000 have been harvested so far – are filtered,
then handed over to microworkers who sort and categorize them.
(While the finished result seems to indicate that Russia is the cleanest country on earth, a more likely explanation seems to be that the
map is biased in favor of Flickr-friendly regions like Western Europe
and the US.)
The combination of public archives, data-mining and human
intelligence makes Let’s do it! a cost-effective way to target waste,
and a great way to mobilize the masses. The platform has a simple
ideology: one person, one action, one day at a time can make a real
difference. This vision is backed up by a powerful technical system,
able to manage and coordinate large-scale direct action.
In the end, the ultimate goal of Let’s do it! is to clean itself out of
business – energizing the whole of society into voluntary action until
litter gets wiped off the map.
1. letsdoitworld.org/
World Cleanup 2012: Let’s clean the world together
2. Microtask article in this book: Riot in a crowded street
25
August 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Winner takes it all?
We here at Microtask spend a lot of time discussing the enormous
potential of crowdsourcing, and how it is going to change all our lives
for the better (just ask our long suffering friends and family). It’s
embarrassing to admit it, but all of us here in the office are a little bit
in love with crowdsourcing (we’d ask it out on a date, but it always
seems to be busy with other people). With that in mind, what I am
about to say may shock you. I urge you to sit down.
Recently I read a rather disturbing article on crowdsourcing.¹
The article focused on 99designs², a community for crowdsourced
web pages and logo designs.
In theory it’s great. Say you want a new identity for your company. All you do is post a design brief on the website, and then sit
back and watch the submissions roll in. At the end of the process you
only pay for your favorite submission.
99designs has all the mechanisms you would expect to ensure chosen work is paid for, avoiding both copyright theft and exploitation
of the community purely as a source of inspiration. Even so, there
is much criticism of how it and similar sites (such as reDesignMe,
MycroBurst, CrowdSpring) operate.
Minority report
Some claim that this kind of crowdsourcing incentivizes quantity
over quality (note 99designs’ mantra “a new design uploaded on
the site every 7 seconds”). There may be some truth to such claims,
although presumably the fact that people are actively using the site
suggests that they believe the results are worth the cost and effort.
People also argue that this “competitive crowdsourcing” exploits
the contributors. As a user who commented on the article I mentioned earlier asked: “I want to know how many of you would show
up at the office Monday morning if you had to compete with 92
co-workers for a single pay check at the end of the day?”. Note that
the two criticisms are interrelated, in a way, given that the ability to
26
only pay for one solution drives the cost down. (Of course an economist might argue that rational contributors factor in their chances
of success as well as the possible reward when they make their decision to participate).
The idea that such communities lead to exploitation gathers
weight when one considers that minors are prevalent amongst the
contributors. Although 99designs is actively trying to stop people
under 18 from accessing the community, their efforts are easily circumvented over the internet.
To this criticism one user replied “No one is forcing people to
participate by sending in designs. This is all voluntary work. (…)
For some of those 11-year-old designers, perhaps they really are
showing an interest in art or design, and this gives them an avenue
to exercise their nascent talents, or learn some designing skills, or
software tools. Heck, I think it would be a great exercise for a school
project in an Art/Design class to have every student work up a submittal as part of a class assignment.” (Without getting into this particular argument, personally I think that there is no doubt that a system like this would be a great teaching aid in certain circumstances).
Creative microtasks?
Leaving these debates aside, for me the underlying question remains:
when a high quality, creative output is required, is competitive
crowdsourcing the best solution? To my mind, the key problem with
these crowdsourcing communities is that submissions are mutually
exclusive. If one is selected all the others are automatically discarded
or must be reworked and adapted for different projects. Many of the
issues surrounding exploitation of contributors flows on from this
fundamental problem.
Happily, there is another way. Crowdsourcing concepts like
Microtask’s, which rely on a very low level of worker input, have an
entirely different approach. Every submission (or “microtask”), when
added to all the other small fragments, cumulatively contributes to
the successful completion of the whole task. Everyone who completes
a task to the standard required will get the reward they expect.
Such a crowdsourcing solution clearly has enormous potential for
27
tasks involving recurring steps or well defined mechanisms, but its
ability to deliver creative solutions has yet to be proven.
This is an area we are currently researching. We would love to
hear your opinion on how creativity and crowdsourcing could coexist in the same sentence without sacrificing output (and life) quality. Don’t worry; all interesting opinions will be rewarded with equal
amounts of our gratitude and respect.
1. Mike Isaac - Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing - Forbes.com
ht.ly/2a9ZD
2. 99 designs - Design Done Differently
99designs.com/
28
November 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Riot in a crowded street
Over the past year or so, Crowdsourcing has proved to be great in a
crisis. As Ushahidi¹ have shown in Haiti and Pakistan, with a decent
software platform, you can channel the crowd into an efficient and
powerful force for good.
But, as Yoda might put it: “power of the crowd, dark side it has”.
If it’s possible to organize the crowd into fixing a crisis, what’s to
stop someone doing the opposite? Imagine a shadowy, sinister figure
(think Tyler Durden from Fight Club, only with a twitter account)
who, at the click of a mouse, can incite thousands of virtual followers
into carrying out his personal Project Mayhem.
Disco Inferno
Steve Dahl, a Chicago DJ in the late 70’s, would be electrified at the
idea. Dahl was known for his outrageous stunts and burning hatred
of all things disco (we can only speculate the reason for this discophobia, a traumatic childhood incident with a glitter ball perhaps?).
Tired of waging a lonely, one-man war against the bell bottomed
lifestyle, in July 1979 Dahl set to work organizing Disco Demolition
Night (a kind of giant flash mob) at Chicago baseball ground,
Comiskey Park. On-air, Dahl rallied baseball fans to his cause by
promising 98 cents entry to that week’s game for anyone who came
with a disco record to sacrifice.
On the day, over 75,000 people showed up, armed with stacks of
albums (which must have given the Bee Gees quite a healthy boost in
sales). When the stadium’s firework team blew up crates of records
the over-excited crowd went crazy, storming the field and creating a
raging bonfire.
Be there or be (four)square
Fast forward to November 2nd 2010, the day residents of San
Francisco decided to celebrate the Giants (another baseball team)
World Series title with a little more (ahem) vigor than average. Tech
29
savvy fans created a “Giants Riot” location on Foursquare. Around
300 people checked in with tips like “Pick up cars” and “Set things
on fire!”. That night, live video and audio streams were followed
by thousands online, while Twitter was bursting with hashtags like
#sfsscanner and #sfriot.
The idea of cyber riots certainly gave the prophets of doom in
the media something to write home about (a quick Google news
search returned over 14,000 articles). But, as Mashable founder Pete
Cashmore pointed out: “if San Franciscans instead chose to phone
a friend…would we then decry the rise of cellphone rioting?” And,
as Steve Dahl showed over 30 years ago, you can whip baseball fans
into a Saturday night fever with nothing more than a radio.
My instinct says it’s not the tech that matters, but what you do
with it (I’m aware that I’m starting to sound a bit like the NRA
saying this). Take Foursquare itself: in November, as well as the
rioters, the site was used by the American Red Cross to encourage blood donation and Feeding America to raise awareness about
hunger relief over Thanksgiving. But still, it’s both inevitable and
disturbing that, once you release powerful, mass management,
crowdsourcing tools like Groundcrew and Foursquare, somebody,
somewhere’s going to use them to mastermind riots and mobilize
revolts. Of course, protest isn’t necessarily a bad thing, in some
places – I’m thinking of Kashmir and Iran – you might want to give
people all the help they can get.
Whether technology is harnessed for good or evil is up to us: only
we decide where to lead, and who to follow. Once again, the future is
in the hands of the crowd – let’s just hope it’s not a crowd made up
entirely of baseball fans.
1. Ushahidi - Thoughts and Lessons from an African Open-Source Project
blog.ushahidi.com/
30
November 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Adventures in Primetime
In high school, math was my personal bane. Like countless others, I
found trigonometry tedious and calculus incomprehensible. In time
though, as I became older and (ahem) more mature, I started to cultivate a serious fascination for hard science. My conversion happened
when I learned of the crazy characters and mad schemes behind so
many groundbreaking discoveries. I might not be able to grasp every
detail of quantum physics or number theory, but the writer in me
can’t resist a good story.
A few years ago, I had the chance to read two amazing books:
Fermat’s Last Theorem and The Music of Primes.
Before you give up and click over to Amazon to get the latest Dan
Brown thriller, let me tell you just one incredible fact. If it hadn’t
been for the work of mathematicians Pierre de Fermat (1601-1665)
and Bernhard Riemann (1826-1866) you wouldn’t be able to buy
anything on Amazon (or anywhere else online) at all.
The indivisible truth
To make a long story short, both these men were all about primes.
Fermat tried to find a way of testing for prime numbers, while
Riemann attempted to predict the distribution of primes from zero
to infinity. Primes (for those who were skipping classes) are numbers
that can be divided only by 1 or themselves. They have no apparent
logical order: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17… the list goes on forever.
So what’s so important about a bunch of random numbers?
Well, primes are the basis of all other numbers or, as Marcus du
Sautoy elegantly puts it, the atoms of arithmetic. Over the centuries,
mathematicians have been obsessed with finding bigger and bigger primes. In 1996, distributed computing joined the search with
GIMPS¹, a project that allows users to run free, prime-hunting software on their PCs. There are thousands of GIMPS volunteers who
together have donated teraflops of processing power.
The very randomness of primes has also proved useful, helping
31
to forge the algorithm that now protects all our credit card numbers
and online transactions.
Decoding the future
In 1859, Riemann finally realized that, working in a multi-dimensional space, a logic in the distribution of prime numbers could actually be found. Unfortunately, Riemann never produced a full proof
of his theory – legend has it his cleaning lady accidentally burned the
papers – so the Riemann hypothesis remains unsolved.
Even in the absence of concrete proof, many people have adopted
the Riemann hypothesis as a working model. Take the RSA algorithm, which is now used to encrypt all transactions with electronic
money (including Amazon’s 32 sales per second). Without going into
details, the principles of RSA encryption are built on the insights
of Fermat and Riemann, but decryption is only possible using the
unproven Riemann hypothesis.
A million dollar question
Since it was formulated, there have been two attempts to crowdsource a solution to the Riemann hypothesis. In 1902 David Hilbert
included it in his list of 23 great math problems, inviting anyone who
could to provide solutions. A century later, the Clay Institute established seven millennium prize problems², offering $1,000,000 for
each correct solution.
So far, I regret to say, crowdsourcing has not brought forth the
solution to the world’s most complex mathematical problem. Who
ever does find the answer – whether it’s an individual, a group, or
even (who knows) a huge, widely distributed, network of collaborators – I’m sure the breakthrough will come with another crazy,
unbelievable story. And, given the importance of prime numbers, no
doubt security services, corporations and governments will be following developments pretty closely as well.
1. Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search - GIMPS - mersenne.org/
2. First Clay Mathematics Institute - claymath.org/millennium/
32
Millennium Prize Announced - Clay Mathematics Institute
August 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Human Flesh Search Engines:
The Most Dangerous Game
Like a wolf in sheep’s clothing, evil is most frightening when in disguise.
The scariest movies – the ones that send shivers up your spine and
keep you awake at night – are those where evil manifests in an innocent
form. As anyone who has seen The Exorcist, The Omen or The Ring (or
looked after a two year old) knows, nothing is scarier than cute kids.
The Human Flesh Search Engine (HFS) sounds awfully sinister.
But far from being a deadly disease or a machine from the Saw series,
it is simply a term used to describe searches that are conducted with
the help of humans (as opposed to the ones carried out through a
search engine like Google).
A tiger in the grass?
A good demonstration of the power of HFS is now known as the
South China Tiger Event. In 2007 a tiger species considered longextinct in the wild was spotted and photographed by a hunter in
the Shaanxi province of China. After the pictures were published in
Science magazine, skeptical Chinese internet users started a challenge to establish whether they were authentic.
The human searchers who took up the challenge included professionals with backgrounds in zoology and botany, photography and
geometry. In the end, however, the key was much simpler. One of
the volunteers recognized an all too striking similarity between the
pictures and a painting in a calendar, exposing them as a scam.
Just as in this example, HFS events generally involve¹ both an
offline element (such as checking photos from old calendars) and
voluntary crowdsourcing.
Typically an event will start with the formation of a small seed
community, which issues a task with a defined goal. Most appear
first on an online forum, enabling searching by broadcasting
requests and action plans, sharing online and offline search results,
33
or offering specific rewards. Some can also be triggered – or widely
publicized – by the mass media.
The taste for human flesh
Unfortunately, as anyone who has heard of the phenomena before will
know (don’t feel bad if you haven’t, as HFS is mainly a Chinese thing),
the applications of HFS are sometimes just as sinister as the name suggests. In 2008, for example, a young man started an HFS claiming he
was sick and looking for help to fulfill his last wish: to see the woman he
loved one more time (cue romantic sighs from the crowd).
Aided by the community, the man managed to trace his lost love.
The problem was, his sickness was actually more mental than physical, a fact well known by his ex-girlfriend who had been hiding from
him (cue violins from the shower scene in Psycho). After trying without success to win her back, he killed her with a knife.
As a result of this accident and other minor abuses, the HFS community started to self-regulate, carrying out background research checks
on those who initiate searches. But while the case was unusual in some
respects, much of what is wrong with this scenario is typical to HFS,
and not addressed by the regulations. The reason why the name Human
Flesh Search Engine is so apt is not just because people are involved in
the search, but because most events involve hunting down people that
the online community want to punish for some reason. This led The
New York Times, to call it online vigilante justice².
But HFS need not be synonymous with petty vigilante justice and tragedy. By combining the wisdom of crowdsourced human intelligence and
the speed of algorithms, these hybrid searches have enormous potential.
What is needed is a system which inspires people to work together
for the greater good, instead of the current Hollywood style do-ityourselves justice league. The question is, are we up to the task? Or
will HFS remain the most dangerous game?
1. A Study of the Human Flesh Search Engine - Computer.org
bit.ly/xJ2nj7
2. Tom Downey - China’s Cyberposse - The New York Times
nyti.ms/dqDARj
34
January 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
The Italian Job
If you’ve ever holidayed in Italy, you might have noticed that many of
the locals, even in popular tourist spots, struggle with English. There
are probably a number of causes for this phenomenon, such as a rusty
education system and the all southern conviction that “you don’t
really need English anyway”, but perhaps the major reason why the
Italians and other Southern European countries struggle is the habit
of dubbing popular TV shows and movies into their native tongue.
Lost in Translation
Take for example the situation in Italy, which I am personally familiar with. The Italian Dubbers’ Union might pride itself as being the
best in the world, but it seems clear that their expertise contributes to
the linguistic shortcomings of their countrymen. Compare the average Italian’s English skills with the average person from Scandinavia
for example – where programs and movies are aired with subtitles
instead of dubbing – and the difference is marked.
While many Italians love their dubbed TV, a large number prefer
subtitles in order to maintain a show’s original flavor and to help
develop their English skills. Once upon a time these people would
have had no alternative to an Italian speaking Homer Simpson.
Perhaps they could have purchased expensive satellite systems to
pick up foreign countries’ shows, but even then the shows would not
be subtitled.
With the advent of high speed file sharing over the internet, opportunities for accessing subtitled media are now plentiful. Accurate subtitles are just a few clicks away, and today people from non-English
speaking countries all over the world are making use of them.
One such website that is leading subtitling innovation is Italian
Subs Addicted¹. The site hosts sets of subtitles for thousands of well
known American TV and Japanese anime series. As an example of
how efficient the Subs Addicted team is, high-quality captions for the
last episode of Lost appeared online just six hours after the original
35
was first broadcast in the United States. That means if an American
show is on overnight, I can wake up in the morning and watch it
complete with subtitles.
Hurry up, Mr Murdoch
The amazing efficiency of sites like Italian Subs Addicted is also presenting a major challenge to the commercial TV networks. While
there are certainly moral issues around the ethics of downloading
torrents (and more ambiguously “subs support”), the speed with
which these sites are providing great-quality captions is leaving the
TV networks in their dust.
It wasn’t long ago, for example, that Rupert Murdoch’s Sky network would take months to come up with the dubbed version of one
of its popular series. But with sites like Italian Subs Addicted around,
it’s now promising dubbed versions just a week later. TV stations are
slowly starting to realize that the service provided by subtitle sites
is so fast and reliable that waiting months just for a fully dubbed
version simply doesn’t make any sense for anyone with an Internet
connection, a minimal know-how and few guilty feelings about copyright infringement.
The Italian Subs Addicted team is able to provide results so
quickly because it crowdsources the translation work among several
collaborators. With teams of people working on separate segments
and then checking each others’ work, the end result is not only fast,
it’s accurate.
Follow the Crowd to the Buried Treasure
One of the big stars of the gaming world is Monkey Island, the pirate
adventure series developed by Ron Gilbert, Tim Schafer and Dave
Grossman. After three sequels, the series disappeared. Then, in
2009, nearly a decade later, TellTale Games announced there would
be another season split into five chapters, aimed at the digital distribution market.
In the non-English speaking world, the buildup to the new series
was just as fervent as everywhere else. But six months after it debuted,
translations of the text are still not available. Frustrated Italian and
36
Spanish speakers want to buy the game but can’t. You can’t help but
wonder how many millions of dollars in sales TellTale Games lost
because of this delay. I’d suggest TellTale becomes acquainted with
communities like Italian Subs Addicted.
You could argue that allowing people access to a game like
Monkey Island before its official release will allow it to leak out –
and you’d have a point. But what if a company developed a reliable
crowdsourcing system to perform the task? One where its contributors’ rights, identity and security were protected and where the
workload would be split into efficient packages?
Crowdsourcing translation is not just a bold new technology that
is providing quick, great-quality translations, but it’s also a way
for those Italian shopkeepers to brush up on their conversational
English. In the gaming world it is an underutilized tool that sounds
to me like a good way of keeping customers happy and providing a
service when it really matters.
1. Italiansubs.net - La Community Italiana Dei Sottotitoli
italiansubs.net/
37
June 2011 by Hannu I. Miettinen
Crowdsourcing: an ancient
Finnish tradition?
Crowdsourcing is generally considered to be a modern invention.
Like many people, I first came across the term in Jeff Howe’s 2006
article The Rise of Crowdsourcing¹. I was impressed by Jeff’s ideas,
but reading the article I began to think: “somehow this concept
sounds very familiar”.
Then I realized why. Crowdsourcing is really just a new name for
a very old Finnish idea: talkoot. Talkoot is a form of collective voluntary work that’s been practiced in Finland for over 1300 years. The
concept dates back to when people first began to build log houses.
Because houses had to be completed before winter (and because it’s
hard to lift a ridge-pole all on your own) people called on their (often
very distant) friends and neighbors to help with construction. By
definition, talkoot is unpaid. Reimbursement is usually food, shelter
and, of course, the satisfaction of doing a good deed.
Talkoot through the ages
Here are some more recent examples of talkoot in action:
The Finnish Cultural Foundation is a private trust that was
founded in the 1930s to promote arts and science. Like most idealistic young people, the Foundation’s organizers had strong principles
but very little money. To solve this problem they turned to talkoot.
Between 1937 and 1939 Foundation volunteers visited thousands of
Finnish homes asking for small contributions. This early “crowdfunding” project raised over 10 million markka (about €1.7 million)
mostly in small individual donations. Today the Cultural Foundation
is Finland’s largest private supporter of the arts and sciences.
In the 1980s I returned to Finland after many years of living abroad.
As a scientist, I quickly realized there was a serious lack of public support and funding for science. I wanted to do something, but I was just
an ordinary citizen – not a government minister or millionaire. Then I
38
remembered the story of the Cultural Foundation and talkoot. Working
with two colleagues, Tapio Markkanen and Heikki Oja, I appealed
to Finnish scientists to help us create the first ever Finnish Science
center. Thousands of researchers, lecturers and teachers responded.
The Heureka Center² opened in the spring of 1989. It was a huge success and Heureka is now one of the world’s most respected science
centers. Another demonstration of the power of talkoot.
The future of tradition
Technology is often accused of destroying old traditions. However
in my opinion, the internet is actually a great environment for the
talkoot-spirit. A striking recent example is Bird Atlas, an online project to map Finland’s nesting bird population. Finland is a large country: 337,000 square kilometers in total. It would be impossible for
a single team of researchers (however dedicated) to produce a complete map. Instead, in the best talkoot/ crowdsourcing-style, project
organizers appealed to the country’s bird-watchers for help. Amateur
ornithologists responded enthusiastically, sending in data and observations from all over the country. Thanks to their hard work, the latest, most complete edition of Bird Atlas has just been published.
Finally of course, there’s Microtask’s own Digitalkoot³ project.
This initiative, using online volunteers to digitize Finland’s national
archive, is a wonderful example of what can be achieved by combining cutting edge technology with the talkoot tradition. The tremendous power of the internet means Digitalkoot could potentially help
preserve thousands of archives and libraries – a global talkoot!
For 1300 years, the concept of joint voluntary work has helped to
build and strengthen Finnish society. Crowdsourcing companies like
Microtask are now redeveloping this fine tradition for the internet
age. Thanks to them, I’m hopeful that the world will continue to benefit from the talkoot-spirit for many more years to come.
1. Jeff Howe - The Rise of Crowdsourcing - Wired.com - bit.ly/BHpY
2. Heureka - The Finnish Science Centre - bit.ly/w3hOS0
3. Digitalkoot - Electrifying our cultural heritage digitalkoot.fi/
39
June 2011 by Hannu I. Miettinen
Crowdsourcing and machine
translation: the start of a
beautiful friendship
Machine-aided translation is one of those things people love to hate.
Despite the best efforts of enthusiasts like myself, the majority of
computer users still believe that machines are useless translators.
The whole area of machine translation has a terrible image problem. There are endless jokes and “true” stories about computer
translation failures. Some of these are very funny (like the machine
that apparently translated the English saying “out of sight, out of
mind” into “invisible idiot” in Russian). However with a little crowdsourcing help, I suspect the machines may have the last laugh.
In defense of machines
Sometimes I almost feel there is a conspiracy against computers.
Take the entry on Machine-aided translation in the Finnish version of Wikipedia. Far from being neutral, the article’s author seems
determined to rubbish all machine translation. He offers readers a
Finnish translation of the following English text, done using Google’s
translator:
“William Shakespeare (baptized 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616)
was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world’s preeminent
dramatist.”
“William Shakespeare (kastettu 26 huhtikuu 1564 – 23 huhtikuu
1616) oli Englanti runoilija ja näytelmäkirjailija, laajalti pidetään
suurin kirjailija, että Englanti kielen ja maailman preeminent
näytelmäkirjailija.”
For readers who do not understand Finnish let me explain: this is
a lousy translation. Of course it is! The Wikipedia author wanted the
translation to be lousy just so he could prove his point. People like
40
this guy treat computers like electronic slaves. Instead of learning how
machine translation actually works, they just bash the keys then yell “I
told you so” when the machine (quite understandably) fails to deliver.
I prefer to view computers as partners and collaborators. In this
spirit, I politely ask Google Translate (I call her GT) to do the work
she is best at, and help her with the rest.
When I collaborate with GT, I first convert the Finnish text into
what I call Googlish: a simplified version of the Finnish language
which GT understands well. The variant of Googlish I use is one I
have constructed specially for translating from Finnish into English.
Softly, I whisper “please GT, translate the Finnish national
song “Maamme” (Our Land). I will convert the Finnish lyrics into
Googlish, then you do the translation, and finally I’ll brush-up your
text a little bit.”
Here is an extract from our result:
Our country is poor and will remain so,
if it’s gold you want.
A stranger walks by us proud,
but this is the land we love,
its forests, its mountains and its reefs,
they to us are dear.
Dear GT, thank you. It is an honor to be your collaborator and friend!
Inviting the crowd
I’m sure you can see the “crowdsourcing potential” of this human/
computer approach. I just ask a native Finnish crowd to do the preediting phase (Finnish to Googlish) then, post-translation, I ask a
native English-speaking crowd to do the final brush-up. These two
crowds can certainly do work much faster and cheaper than I can
(and probably also considerably better).
Language is a skill that took us humans hundreds of thousands of
years to develop. Given that computers have only been “evolving” for
a few decades, their language skills are really very impressive. I’m convinced that machine-aided translation has enormous potential to help
people understand and communicate better. Just as long as we also
learn to understand and communicate a bit better with our machines.
41
January 2011 by Ida Hakola
Bringing anarchy to the creative
process – When distributed
work meets interesting
web content
Tommaso: Ida, would you like to write a blog post for us, sharing
your ideas on crowdsourcing?
Ida: Sure, sounds good! I already have a few thoughts…
Two weeks later. The first idea that pops into my head is a text written like a ninth grade “creative essay”. You know, the one where you
write a few words, fold the paper and hand it to the next person who
continues the story with words of his own. NO. This is clearly not
the way to bring the crowdsourcing idea to the process of creating
interesting web content. Or maybe it might work by chance – but
just once.
My work in Vapa Media revolves around interesting, up to date
and good web content in general. The first questions arise when one
must decide, what good content actually is, and what it is not. To
make it simple I think that good web content has an audience, while
bad content doesn’t. What is not interesting, doesn’t exist. The same
philosophy applies to business in general.
Naturally there are ways to crowdsource when it comes to tagging web content, but could crowds actually help create the content?
Good content equals quality and for quality you need a mixture of
great ideas, hard work and vision. Could a crowd have a shared
vision or is the idea of microtasking doomed to fail in the first place
when it comes to content creation processes?
The more I delve into the idea, the more I think that something
can be done. At Vapa we are almost intoxicated by trying to get into
the minds of our site’s followers and readers. Whether it is with
42
articles, videos, blogs or random piece of texts, we aim to please our
readers. So what could be crowdsourced in this process? The writing
process itself might be hard to share, though there are exceptions.
Ever heard of the sci-fi book Metro 2033? Russian author Dmitry
Glukhovsky started publishing chapters of his unfinished book on
the web while he was still writing the book. Glukhovsky wanted the
readers to have their say on the storyline – and they did! Thousands
people rewrote the chapter and in the end the novel reached 2 million online readers before it was printed.
Glukhovsky’s story was a happy one (ahem, except for the nuclear
apocalypse part, of course), but business-wise it’s probably more
convenient and easy to share the idea rather than the final product.
Instead of crowdsourcing the final content, why not make the creative project public? In reality that would mean publishing just the
rough idea and aims of the project. This could happen by gathering a
panel of people from different backgrounds while sharing and modifying the creative process: wikidea.
Of course anarchy would result. Spread the creative process to
masses and beware. Various opinions, point of views, likes and interests crashing to each other and trying to stand out in the process of
creating the killer application – or in this case: the winning content
concept. I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t be a nice bed of roses. But the
creative project never is. It gives you a headache. So why not crowdsource the creative pain?
43
April 2011 by Jani Penttinen
Speaking in tongues:
how the crowd is
transforming translation
Ever since the first letter was chiseled out of a stone tablet, people
have needed to translate text into other languages.
And while keyboards are somewhat faster than chisels, the hassle involved in translating text hasn’t changed much since Moses
tried to tweet the Ten Commandments: you have to find a translator,
negotiate the price, send the text, and then wait a few days for it to
come back.
Because this process is both expensive and time consuming, we’re
used to avoiding it. Usually we only translate documents when we
have to, such as an application for a foreign visa or an instruction
manual for a product to be sold overseas.
Machine translation, such as Google Translate, has been around
for a few years, but quality is still an issue. It is a great tool when you
personally need to understand some foreign text, but it falls far short
of the standard required for publishing.
Enter the crowd
In the last year translations have entered the era of crowdsourcing,
transforming the industry profoundly. There are now numerous
crowdsourced translation providers, each with thousands of translators on call. They provide native speakers, professional translators,
or a mix of the two.
This has changed the industry in several key ways. The first is
time. Through these networks you can always get a translator
instantly. You can’t pick who does the work (this is the idea of crowdsourcing after all…), but you can choose if you want the work to be
done by a native speaker or a certified translator. (Most of the time
all you really care about is that a qualified translator translates the
44
text.) Without the normal administrative hassle and waiting, turnaround time is only as long as it takes the individual to translate the
text, which is about 200 words per hour for a professional translator.
The second change is cost. With translators working from home
via the internet, overheads plunge. This makes it cheaper of course,
but also means you can translate short pieces of text, or even single
words. Short sentences introduce a problem with potential ambiguity when the translator is not familiar with the product, but all the
translator networks allow you to submit additional instructions that
help the translator understand what it is that you wish to say.
API: A fan of man
But perhaps the most significant change is that these networks can
now be controlled through an application programming interface
(API). This means that the ordering of translations can be fully automated, while the actual work is performed by real human beings.
This opens up a whole new world of innovation.
Take Transfluent¹ as a completely random example (it is pure
coincidence that I am CEO and founder). Using an API and an army
of crowdsourced translators around the world, it can automatically
read text from social media streams, translate it, and make it available online.
This means, for example, that you can write a tweet in English
at any time of the day, knowing that the tweet will also appear in
Japanese and French a few minutes later. Traditionally this would
involve a lot of tedious work per tweet, but Transfluent can automate the entire process. The efficiency, low overhead costs and quick
turnaround time mean that even large quantities of small tasks are
now economic.
Still unsure? Talk to a professional
As with anything, some people are skeptical of crowdsourced translations. Some see crowdsourcing as a hobby, rather than a professional service. This probably stems from Facebook’s early success
with the concept, where anyone could help translate the site’s user
interface.
45
But the Facebook-model is only one form of crowdsourced translation. As mentioned above, there are now a number of networks of
professionals who are paid to do small individual tasks. Because you
pay for the work you can expect professional quality in return.
Another criticism is that pay is too low to attract qualified translators. In some cases this is valid, but we need to keep in mind that the
industry is very young. There is pressure to increase the levels of pay,
and at the same time new and innovative business applications may
help justify higher price brackets for those who require the highest
quality work.
Despite these concerns, the industry is developing rapidly.
Getting tweets automatically translated to a number of languages
within minutes of posting them is very exciting, but I believe we are
just at the beginning of a whole new era. In years to come, the language will no longer be a barrier of entry to new markets. We are
one huge step closer to a world where everyone can understand each
other, and participate in a global marketplace.
1. Rapid professional translation for your Facebook, Twitter and website
46
transfluent.com/
September 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Transfluent: tweeting
in tongues
Extreme stunt group The Dudesons are one of Finland’s biggest
exports. These four death-defying maniacs have a long-running,
widely-broadcast TV show specializing in stunts so stupidly dangerous they make Jackass look safety-conscious. The Dudesons have
many talents (like still being able to move without wheelchairs), but
even their biggest fans would admit the guys aren’t exactly “intellectuals”. So recently, followers were surprised and impressed when
Dudeson member Jukka Hilden suddenly began to tweet in fluent
Spanish. Were the Dudesons secretly sneaking off to night school?
Did they accidentally slingshot themselves all the way to Barcelona?
Not quite. In fact the group has been taking advantage of a unique
new crowdsourced service: Transfluent.
French connections
Transfluent offers near real-time, professional translation of social
media feeds and websites. It does this by cleverly distributing the
work to an online army of talented translators. Given that it involves
crowdsourcing (and the company was founded by our friend Jani
Penttinen), we decided to give Transfluent a try.
First, of course, we had to choose a language to translate to.
Apparently, the Dudesons opted for Spanish because they have a
large fan-base in Latin America (it’s amazing how eye-watering selfinflicted pain transcends cultural boundaries). In the end, we decided
to go with French as it’s widely spoken and because the French often
seem less willing to use English than some other Europeans.
The result? All our Twitter content @microtask gets immediately translated and reposted to the French account. Jani explains:
“Before Transfluent it was almost impossible to translate Twitter
messaging as it required too much work and traditional translation agencies are too slow. Our fast response times are due to
47
crowdsourcing: all our translations are crowdsourced from networks of professional translators.”
Thanks to this linguistically gifted crowd, Microtask can now
effortlessly tweet in two languages. C’est magnifique, non?
Breaking the language barrier
Over the last couple of years, the crowdsourced translation of
social networking sites has been a major (very well-publicized) success story. Thanks to the efforts of thousands of users, Twitter and
Facebook are now available in dozens of languages. However, in
Europe at least, the vast majority of people still tweet exclusively in
English. As Jani said, this means that “English Twitter is already
quite saturated marketplace, but all the other languages have a lot
of users but not so much interesting material to follow.”
In this “Twitter vacuum”, well-targeted translation can give companies (and TV stunt-groups) a real social networking boost. Our
own experience certainly supports the theory. @microtask_fr has
already gained thousands of users. French speakers now make up
about 1/3 of our total Twitter following. (Of course, we like to think
this is due to our witty, well-articulated tweets, rather than because
there’s nothing else worth reading.)
Real-time tweet translation is more than just another crowdsourcing novelty. Potentially, it’s an easy, simple and relatively cheap way
for companies to increase their “global web presence”. And as we
(and the Dudesons) have discovered while working with Transfluent,
everyone appreciates it when you’re tweeting in their language.
48
January 2012 by Ville Miettinen
Banking on one another:
Can the crowd save itself
from the banks?
First they lend too much, cause a financial meltdown and need bailing out. Now they don’t lend enough (unless share-options and fat
bonuses count as lending). As any former Wall St inhabitant, election-year politician or self-respecting Hollywood celebrity will tell
you: banks are pure evil.
Personally, I quite like the banking system as a whole. Swiping a
little plastic card in exchange for a pile of food is my favorite magic
trick. Still, there’s no doubt the current system could be improved.
And, you guessed it, crowdsourcing may be able to help, by offering
an alternative way for people to borrow and lend money.
Models for (spare) change
A variety of crowd-based alternatives now provide ways for people
to lend money to each other for profit, sidestepping the banks. As
banks continue to clamp down on lending, these companies are seeing enormous growth.
The exchange begins with borrowers proposing an amount they
want to borrow. Then, much like crowdfunding, lenders contribute to the loan until it reaches its goal and the borrower gets their
money. Some companies like RateSetter automatically link lenders
and borrowers by the rates they want. Others like Funding Circle,
which specializes in funding for small businesses, allow lenders
greater control.
Despite their growth, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending only accounts
for around $270 million of lending in the US. Such a measly amount
is nowhere near sufficient to meet demand caused by banks’ current
unwillingness to lend.
The reasons for the small numbers (when did 270 million become
49
a small number?) are numerous. There’s understandable reluctance from customers to manage their own lending. Crowdbanking
(or maybe “distributed lending” anyone?¹ ) must also overcome
unfriendly regulation, vested interests and an entrenched banking
system that we still depend on even if it does go a little crazy now
and then.
Law of the lever(age)
Ultimately, traditional banking has a key advantage over distributed
lending: leverage. Because of its P2P model, the distributed lenders
only lend as much money as their members put in. Corporations and
banks can leverage capital to effectively create money out of thin air.
Of course, this may be a good thing: the absence of leverage means
P2P lenders can’t inflate themselves into oblivion and cause economic meltdowns.
So, are we on the cusp of a banking revolution, or is it just a flash
in the pan? Assuming the hurdles mentioned above can be overcome,
the question, I think, will come down to convenience and reliability.
If P2P lending and borrowing is more economic than using a bank,
and becomes as easy as bidding on eBay, why wouldn’t it catch on?
With Google and Facebook already tinkering about with transaction
services and even their own currencies, the stage is set for the shift
in thinking that may enable this change. And we know that big things
can happen when people tap the power of the crowd.
Of course, if it all collapses, we can always fall back on a system of
barter. Which will be good for plumbers and carpenters, but not so
good for us at Microtask (you try bartering microtasks in exchange
for a cheeseburger at 1am).
1. Ville Miettinen - The Danger of Declassified Information Dailycrowdsource.com
bit.ly/zClUfS
50
January 2012 by Ville Miettinen
Confidence tricks: can
crowdsourcing keep our
feet on the ground?
Charles Darwin once wrote that “ignorance more frequently begets
confidence than does knowledge.”
Despite how far society has progressed since this was written, it
seems as relevant now as it ever was. Whether it’s refusing to stop
and ask for directions because we’re sure we know the right way
(only to find ourselves lost in the wilderness), or setting the treadmill
too fast and ending up in a spluttering heap on the gym floor, most of
us can relate to its sentiment.
But misplaced confidence can go beyond slapstick, with devastating consequences. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the continued
resistance to tackling climate change are arguably two such examples.
Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing
But what makes us overconfident in our judgments? And what keeps
those with valuable knowledge in the background? Research¹ from
social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning may explain
why we get it wrong so often.
Their experiments revealed that people generally overestimate
their ability in areas they understand poorly, and underestimate
their ability where their understanding is good. This is known as
the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and is one of many cognitive biases that
affect us all.
Only the lonely
In a world where we’re told to think big and believe in ourselves, can
we avoid becoming victims of our own accidental arrogance? The
Dunning-Kruger Effect has one important limit: it only applies to
individuals (except me, of course). This is where the crowd may offer
51
a way to keep our feet on the ground.
Here at Microtask we’ve seen that by having multiple members
of the crowd complete the same task we can achieve far better accuracy than by relying on individual judgment. But the potential of the
crowd may take us much further.
Research into collective reasoning focuses on the concept of the
wise crowd, a group which mixes experts and amateurs. In a wise
crowd, laypeople are free to ask difficult questions and offer unorthodox solutions that experts may not consider. In turn, the experts
are required to explain their observations and conclusions, and to be
transparent in their reasoning.
United we stand
The power of the wise crowd depends on its diversity. By replacing
the traditional team of experts, each with their own specialist area
(like the one that produced the Deepwater Horizon risk assessment),
with a wise crowd, it may be possible to sidestep the Dunning-Kruger
Effect. Members of the crowd are encouraged to think for themselves
and to be skeptical of bold claims. The crowd prioritizes clarity and
results rather than blind confidence.
The crowd’s potential for new, better forms of reasoning raises
exciting possibilities for the future, but how far could it go? Could
crowd power show us the way to a more rational form of society?
The Arab Spring has shown the power of the crowd to overthrow
dictatorial regimes but so far most attempts at using crowdsourcing
to design better alternatives have met with limited success (Iceland’s
constitution being one of a few exceptions).
Despite such setbacks, as we learn to use crowdsourcing more
effectively, I am certain that it will solve all the world’s problems
caused by overconfidence. Absolutely, 100% certain.
1. Justin Kruger & David Dunning - Unskilled and Unaware of it
- Cornell University
bit.ly/bGihg7
52
November 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Crowded planet: desperately
seeking sustainability
According to the latest UN figures, there are now over 7 billion people
living on planet earth. In response, the world’s media has exploded
with dire predictions of famine, war and climate disaster (and some
great info-graphics). Of course, in Finland over-population is hardly
a major problem (except for reindeer and right-wing politicians).
But we’re probably as guilty as any Western nation when it comes to
over-consuming resources.
As well as rapidly reproducing, humans are fast becoming an
“overwhelmingly urban species”. By 2050 there will be over 8 billion
people living in cities. Can we find a way (other than by crowd funding a moon colony¹ ) to live sustainably on such a crowded planet?
According to some experts (and kindergarten teachers everywhere)
the answer is simple: learn to share.
Shared visions
Imagine the perfect eco-city. What do you see? Green spaces? Lowrise housing? Hippies meditating on roof gardens? Not according to
futurologist Alex Steffen. True eco-cities, Steffen argues, are hyperdense and hyper-connected. Denser urban environments mean
fewer cars and therefore less pollution. Increased connectivity also
allows people to share and access city services. Steffen highlights
apps like Mapnificent – which crowdsources public transport routes
– as examples. He argues that technology-enabled “crowd sharing”
could eventually see communities pooling everything from surplus
space and energy, to food and power drills.
Steffen’s ideas might sound ambitious (he does want Americans to
stop driving cars, after all), but many of his “predictions” are already
a crowdsourced reality. In her latest publication The Enabling City²,
Chiara Camponeschi (another sustainability guru), lists an incredible variety of collaborative city projects – global and local. There’s
53
Neglected Spaces a London-based scheme to share and repair disused buildings. In the USA Bright Neighbor combines community
involvement with online social tools to “increase livability, sustainability and improve local economies”. There’s even a Tool Lending
Library service based in Berkeley, California.
The Enabling City is designed as a toolkit to engage and motivate urban citizens. In Chiara Camponeschi’s own words “there are
vast amounts of untapped knowledge and creativity out there that
we need to unleash to make our cities more open and sustainable”.
Inspiring stuff.
The West vs the rest?
Despite their grand vision, both Steffen and Camponeschi only really
tackle sustainability in the developed world. All the crowdsourced
projects listed in The Enabling City (and it’s a pretty long list) are
based in Europe or North America. Plus I wonder how Alex Steffen’s
“denser, greener future” applies to already chronically overcrowded
cities like Manila and Lagos.
While growing populations are a worldwide issue, developing
countries face the toughest, most urgent challenges. In the next 40
years, African cities alone are set to triple in size. As we discuss in the
Microwork section of this book, developing countries have embraced
crowdsourcing. Imagine if the creative, innovative developing-world
crowd also had experts like Steffen and Camponeschi fighting their
corner. It could be a powerful, sustainable, combination.
1. Helen Briggs - Moon colony ‘within 20 years’ - Bbc News
bbc.in/z37Ofq
2. The Enabling City - The power of the everyday
enablingcity.com/
54
November 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Apocalypse Now-ish:
can crowdsourcing
save us from 2012?
As every Mayan priest and Hollywood film director knows, 2012 is
officially the year of the apocalypse. All over the world, conspiracy
theorists are stocking up on canned goods and exchanging tips on
bunker design.
There’s even a black US president, and that only ever happens in
disaster movies. In these dark days, can anyone save humanity? Yes,
that’s right folks, the crowd can (well sort of).
Take the classic doomsday scenario of an asteroid hurtling
towards the earth. For many years, scientists have struggled to identify and track every “near earth object”. Now the European Space
Agency (ESA) has appealed to the crowd for help. ESA is piloting a
project where amateur astronomers work with automated software
to hunt for asteroids. Volunteers in Tenerife have already spotted
one asteroid classed as a “potential impact threat”. Luckily it “just”
missed the earth by about 30 million km (so no need to call in Bruce
Willis quite yet). ESA aims to have nightly crowdsourced sky surveys
running by (you guessed it) 2012.
What about Hollywood’s other favorite apocalypse: the killer
global virus? Here too crowdsourcing may have the answer – the
humble video game. Recently, the scientific establishment¹ was
astonished when players of online protein-folding game Foldit²
work out the structure of an HIV enzyme. Biochemists have struggled with this fiendishly complex enzyme for over 10 years. It took
the Foldit crowd 3 weeks to decode it. Finding the antidote to a
deadly global epidemic should be no problem.
Finally, if the end really is nigh, we can always mobilize crowdsourced crisis response platforms³ to help sort out the mess. I bet
Ushahidi could have an interactive zombie infestation map online
55
in under 24 hours. Clearly the crowd has got global annihilation
covered. 2012? Bring it on I say.
1. Michael J. Coren - Foldit Gamers Solve Riddle of HIV Enzyme within 3 weeks
- Scientific American
bit.ly/qAbnsq
2. Foldit - Solve Puzzles for Science
fold.it/portal
3. Patrick Meier - How to Crowdsource Crisis Response - Crowdsourcing.org
bit.ly/y4zkIF
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August 2011 by Ville Miettinen
The Pursuit of Crowdsourcing:
Iceland’s constitutional saga
If there was a top ten of crowdsourcing nations, Iceland would be the
new number one. Back in June the small Northern state hit the (tech)
headlines when politicians announced plans to crowdsource a new
constitution.¹ At first, I confess I was skeptical. In my experience government crowdsourcing projects are like Mars probes: there’s a massive launch, then six months later they mysteriously vanish without
trace. But not this time. On July 29th Reykjavik declared the new constitution complete: for the people and most definitely by the people.
So how do you crowdsource a whole new system of government?
Basically the same way you crowdsource anything: invite citizens
to suggest new ideas via websites and social networks. Of course, it
helps that Iceland has 94% internet penetration and over a thousand
years of democratic history.
The finished constitution document is now available online² in both
Icelandic and English. Policies include electoral reform, government
transparency and decentralization. There’s an impressive absence
of “Jedi clauses” or “pastafarian amendments” so either web users
are finally growing-up or (as my inner cynic suspects) the Icelandic
Government employed some hard-core moderators and editors.
Iceland’s pioneering crowdsourcing efforts have certainly wowed
the blogosphere. The project’s Facebook wall³ is covered with
international messages of support (plus a few Icelanders attempting actual political debate). It seems people everywhere love a bit of
crowdsourced democracy. Iceland is the first country to achieve constitutional reform via crowdsourcing. I suspect it won’t be the last.
1. Haroon Siddique - Mob rule: Iceland crowdsources its next constitution
- The Guardian bit.ly/jSyu8b
2. The Constitutional Council stjornlagarad.is/english/
3. Stjórnlagaráð - Facebook.com - facebook.com/Stjornlagarad
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May 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Distributed work and data
security: can the crowd
keep a secret?
In these post-WikiLeaks days, many people (and governments)
might argue the only way to keep data confidential is to keep it
offline. After all, the web was designed to link and share information.
Online, as Sun Microsystems founder Scott McNealy once tactfully
remarked,¹ “You have zero privacy. Get over it.”
The trouble with the “McNealy philosophy” is that the web is now
the place where millions of people go to work, as well as play. Even
the most innocent, open, non-evil companies generally have some
data – such as personal information, research and development
strategy, secret Santa lists – they need to keep secure.
Distributed work platforms face a unique and particularly knotty
data security dilemma. If your business model relies on distributing
client data among a vast (often anonymous) crowd of strangers, how
do you make sure that any confidential information stays on the QT?
Crowd control
Six years after the launch of Mechanical Turk, crowd labor platforms
have become pretty good at extracting high-quality, consistent results
from workers. But in some ways, confidentiality is even more crucial
than accuracy. A bad data set and you’ll probably have to rerun some
tasks. Bad data security and you might end up several million dollars
worse off (as Google Buzz recently learnt the hard way).
Many of the basic “bread and butter” tasks of distributed work
involve potentially sensitive data. Think of phone transcription,
handwriting recognition, email address searches and SMS translation. There’s also the growing area of crowdsourced market research
and product testing. What if someone in the crowd reveals your killer
new mobile app (Moderately Irritated Frogs) to the folks at Rovio?
58
C.S confidential
It’s up to individual distributed work platforms to figure out how
to deal with data security. One option is simply to do nothing. This
sophisticated strategy is employed by the granddaddy of crowd labor,
Mechanical Turk. To quote from their participation agreement:
“submission of any…materials is at your own risk, none of
Amazon Mechanical Turk, its Affiliates, Requesters or Providers
has any obligations (including without limitation obligations of
confidentiality) with respect to such materials.” In other words,
it ain’t our fault if you’re dumb enough to spill your secrets here.
Unsurprisingly, you don’t see much that would interest Julian
Assange in Mechanical Turk requests.
Most service providers are more hands on. Editing and translation platform Serv.io, guarantees that: “All Servio workers sign an
agreement that prohibits them from using information for any purpose other than carrying out their Servio tasks.” Even more hardcore, crowdsourced transcription company CastingWords² operate
a strict one-strike-and-you’re-out policy: “workers understand that
the work is confidential, and that they will never work for us again
if they release it.”
Here at Microtask we prefer to opt for prevention rather than
cure. Our strategy is to break material down into tasks so small that
confidentiality ceases to be an issue. Individual workers never get
hold of enough puzzle pieces to see the big picture.
The tasks are out there
As the crowd labor sector develops, projects are becoming bigger,
more customized and more complex. Some clients have data requiring different levels of confidentiality. Leaving micro tasks aside, the
most economic solution for such clients will be platforms that can
categorize data according to sensitivity and treat it accordingly. For
example, tasks rated highly classified (X-tasks perhaps) could be
restricted to pre-selected, traceable workers who have signed legally
binding non-disclosure agreements. Really ultra-confidential tasks
(like transcribing the CIA’s Roswell archives or KFC’s secret recipe)
59
could even be passed back to employees within the client company
(who are later killed, I suppose).
Data security will be a key issue for the crowdsourcing industry.
It’s a simple equation: the more companies trust us to keep their
information confidential, the more work we’ll get (and vice versa). If
anyone has any thoughts or juicy crowdsourcing stories to share, as
always we’d love to hear from you. Please check your confidentiality
terms first.
1. Polly Sprenger - Son on Privacy: ‘Get Over It’ - Wired.com
bit.ly/iX8Y
2. Castingwords.com FAQ - Confidentiality
bit.ly/zJf5jj
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May 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Crowdsourcing global
development: working theories
What do Madonna, the Chinese Government and crowdsourcing all
have in common? Answer: a complex and sometimes controversial
relationship with the developing world.
Take the much quoted statistic that 33% of workers on Mechanical
Turk are located in India. It sounds impressive, right? Thousands
of people in a developing country using Mechanical Turk to earn
some much needed extra rupees. But according to a recent study by
Microsoft Research India, the vast majority of Indian Turkers are
college graduates with above-average household incomes. In other
words, mainly middle class kids.
We like to think of paid crowdsourcing as a truly “equal opportunities” phenomena. A global workplace where anyone anywhere can
get a job. But is this really true outside developed, computer-literate
countries? Has crowdsourcing lived up to its potential when it comes
to employing the world’s poor?
Lost in translation
The researchers at Microsoft Research India conducted an experiment.¹ They selected a group of Indians with lower incomes, highschool standard education and only basic English and computer
skills. After researchers explained the basic concept of Mechanical
Turk (it’s not mechanical, there are no Turks), the participants were
set a range of simple tasks. The results make uncomfortable reading.
To cut a long study short, every participant in the group failed
to complete the tasks. Why? Mainly because people couldn’t navigate Mechanical Turk or follow requestors’ “ad-hoc and complex”
instructions. The researchers responded by simplifying the interface
and translating instructions into the local language. Result: task
completion was boosted from 0 to 66%.
Now, I know Mechanical Turk requestors are an intelligent bunch,
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but surely it’s a bit extreme to expect them to translate every task
into multiple languages – India alone has hundreds of languages
and dialects. Instead, the researchers suggest that crowdsourcing
platforms create “standardized human instruction sets” (you can
tell these are programmers): individual, pre-written, simple English
sentences that requestors use to write tasks.
Of course, even if the instructions are crystal clear and the platform is a miracle of human-centered design, there’s still the problem
of access. Only 6% of Indian households have a PC and internet connection. Some African countries are still waiting for broadband to
arrive. Internet cafés are expensive, plus many people in the developing world don’t have bank accounts.
Hatching an industry
The authors of the study state that “paid crowdsourcing has the
potential to improve earnings and livelihoods in poor communities around the world.” But actually creating a paid crowdsourcing industry in developing countries is clearly a mammoth task. It
requires connecting more people to the internet, redesigning crowd
labor platforms, improving computer skills and adapting more tasks
for mobile phones. Will commercial crowdsourcing companies be
willing (or even able) to invest that kind of time and money?
Crowdsourcing has been described as an “egg before chicken”
industry (stay with me here, I promise it will make sense). You need
the workers (or eggs) in place in order to attract clients (er, chickens).
Unlocking the potential of the millions of workers in the developing
world could accelerate the growth of the whole paid crowdsourcing
industry. Or as the study puts it: “requesters could find lower-cost
labor, platform owners could benefit from larger volumes, and
the crowdsourcing paradigm as a whole could scale up to address
much grander problems”. It sounds like a bright future, now all we
have to do is figure out how to make it happen.
1. Khanna, Ratan, Davis & Thies - Evaluating and Improving the Usability of
Mechanical Turk for Low-Income Workers in India - Microsoft Research
bit.ly/eKLA7d
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April 2011 by Ville Miettinen
War Games (or hovw
the US military learned
to love the crowd)
Question: where do you work if you: a) are a genius, b) are too crazy
for NASA and c) really like blowing stuff up? Answer: DARPA.
The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has a $3 billion budget, a remit to “create lasting revolutionary change” and a
project list that looks like it was written by Philip K Dick. Current
schemes¹ include shape-shifting matter, laser guided bullets, flying
submarines and robotic beetles. Since its creation during the cold
war, DARPA has been credited with some spectacular innovations
including GPS, stealth planes and the first ever internet network. But
for every hit, there’s been a (usually embarrassingly wacky) miss.
Famous failures include the Vietnam mechanical war elephant and
an operation to train telepathic spies. And the latest far-out DARPA
scheme? Er, crowdsourcing.
Getting off the ground
Given its cutting-edge reputation, DARPA was surprisingly late to
the crowdsourcing party. The agency only launched its first crowdbased experiment in 2009 – an open competition to test whether
online social networks could be used to gather precise data. DARPA
released 10 red weather balloons at secret locations across the U.S.
The first team to pinpoint the coordinates of all of them was offered a
$40,000 prize. Using Facebook, Twitter, public radio and good oldfashioned bribery, the winning team² tracked down every balloon in
an impressive 9 hours.
Obviously impressed by the crowd’s talent for tracking inflatables,
in 2011 DARPA launched the snappily titled Experimental CrowdDerived Combat-Support Vehicle Competition. The competition
invited the crowd to submit designs for a “groundbreaking” new
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military jeep. The contest ran for a month and DARPA received and
validated over 150 entries (it’s not a massive number but I guess
there are only so many frustrated amateur Humvee designers out
there).
Submersive elements
Finally, this April, DARPA waded into the deeper waters of crowdsourced gaming. The Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail
Unmanned Vessel or ACTUV Program is a project to build an automatic submarine-tracking drone. DARPA has asked the crowd to
help refine ACTUV’s software by playing a tactics simulation game.
In the game players navigate a virtual drone through various scenarios: targeting enemy ships, hiding from commercial traffic, trying to avoid accidentally surfacing off North Korea. After completing
missions, players “debrief” their tactics to DARPA. The best crowd
strategies will eventually be incorporated into ACTUV’s software.
You might ask why random gamers are testing this simulation
instead of say, trained submarine crews. I guess part of the answer
is that trained submarine crews are busy crewing submarines. Using
the crowd also allows DARPA to collect huge quantities of data very
quickly and cheaply. Game scores are also a great way to automatically sort the best and worst underwater tactics. The only limit is the
game itself. However imaginative the simulation designers are, reallife sub hunting is bound to throw up a few “untested scenarios”.
The idea of “military crowdsourcing” clearly has some ethical issues. So far, DARPA’s crowd-based experiments have been
restricted to tactical and support operations. But what if the next
project is helping to design an attack drone or program a flesh-eating robot? The agency seems determined to push the boundaries of
crowd collaboration. Time will tell how helpful the crowd is – and
whether it will choose to play.
1. Avvo Admin - 12 Insane But True DARPA Projects - Nakedlaw.avvo.com
bit.ly/Am4AdC
2. Larry Greenemeier - Inflated Expectations - Scientific American
bit.ly/5xaGIe
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March 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Crowd funding: a monumental
achievement
Detroit is a tough town, down on its luck. First there was the fall of
the US motor industry, then a global financial meltdown. Thousands
of people have left the city. Many neighborhoods are now derelict –
populated only by violent gangs, wild dogs and film crews shooting
apocalyptic zombie movies. In these troubled times, can anyone save
“Motor City”?
Forget Obama and Government investment. Long-term, sustainable regeneration? No way. What Detroit really needs is a half-man
half-machine, kick-ass eighties movie icon. That’s right, a statue of
Robocop.
Robot Love
It all started with a tweet. Some guy on Twitter asked the mayor of
Detroit about a Robocop statue. Mayor Bing (unsurprisingly) replied:
“there are not any plans to erect a statue to Robocop.” But luckily for
fans of the law-enforcing cyborg this is 2011 – the age of crowd funding.
Two days after the original tweet, a Detroit-based collective called
Imagination Station launched a Detroit Needs A Statue of Robocop
campaign on the crowd funding site Kickstarter. That was February
9th. By February 17th the project had reached its target of $50,000.
Over 2000 people have donated money. When the campaign officially closes on March 30th, Imagination Station will probably be
able to fill a police station with Robocop statues.
Clearly, we can learn a lot from this story. First, real-life solutions
are no match for Hollywood sensation (as if Arnie’s election hadn’t
proven this already). More importantly perhaps, we have learned
that in the age of the internet, just because an idea is stupid doesn’t
mean it won’t succeed. In fact, the more absurd an idea is the more
chance it has to go viral. With crowd funding taking off, going viral
is all an idea needs.
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Epidemic spread
Of course going viral is easier said than done. Some content, like
Colonel Gaddafi’s latest rap video, seem destined for greatness.
Which ideas will go viral is harder to predict: who would have
thought that the campaign to make an old Rage Against the Machine
song the Christmas No 1 single in the UK would succeed, outselling
The X Factor’s hit?
Unsurprisingly, creating a “viral campaign” is an advertising
executive’s dream. Whether or not getting 5 million people to watch
a man in a Gorilla suit play the drums actually sells lots more chocolate is uncertain, but it sure does make the ad execs feel cool.
With crowd funding on the other hand, viral success translates to
cold hard cash. Sure, the far majority of people will just have a laugh
at your idea to build an absurd monument, but the Long Tail of the
internet means that lots will also cough up money, if given the chance.
Even rather dull ideas can succeed in this wonderful new world.
Last December, a small US design company raised over $900,000
from people (again via Kickstarter) keen to place a pre-order for
an iPod Nano watchstrap. Hardly a statue of Robocop, yet almost
14,000 people invested.
It’s almost impossible to predict what the next big viral phenomenon will be. I doubt anyone – especially Mayor Bing – expected
Detroit to get a $50,000 Robocop statue this spring. (Perhaps he
supposed the money would be better spent on homeless shelters or
paying the wages of a few real cops. The fool.) Creative, powerful,
often surprising, and sometimes totally bizarre: crowd funding, I
salute you.
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February 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Grandma knows best:
experiments in distributed
education
Last year, in a terrible blow to national pride, Finland dropped from
first to third place in a global survey of child literacy.
The study ranked Finnish students below those in Shanghai and
South Korea.
Many people blame excessive technology for the educational
downturn. Finnish kids of today are internet addicts – plugged in,
switched on, zoned out.
But not everyone agrees that children and computers should be
kept apart. Educational expert Professor Sugata Mitra has spent the
last decade researching how computers can help to educate some of
the world’s poorest children.
In a (very entertaining) TED talk¹ , Professor Mitra discusses
his experiments in “self-learning”. His first scheme was setting up
“hole in the wall” computers in villages in rural India. Machines were
installed on the streets, raised about a meter off the ground. Groups
of kids spent hours figuring out how the computers worked – often
managing to teach themselves English in the process.
Word on the street
Not content with his progress, the professor came up with another
idea: the Grandmother Effect. The theory is that grandmas are good
at encouraging kids. They praise them and say things like: “Now that
is clever dear, I’d never have been able to analyze the molecular
structure of DNA all by myself!” Supervising village children, Indian
grandmothers got some impressive results: test scores almost doubled in two months (perhaps Finnish schools should try recruiting
Korean grandmas to bring literacy back up).
And the next step? The “Granny Cloud”. While working at Newcastle
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University, Professor Mitra recruited over 200 UK grandmothers as
volunteers. Broadcasting via webcam each “grandmother” spends at
least an hour a week encouraging classes of Indian school children.
Some of the Indian locations are so remote that the Granny Cloud is
the only access kids have to education.
Grey Power
It’s a cute story, but there’s also a serious point here. Europe has an
aging population: millions of people in their 60s, 70s and 80s with
time and expertise to spare. This demographic has huge, untapped
crowdsourcing potential. Hopefully, voluntary schemes like Prof.
Mitra’s will be trendsetters – demonstrating the possibilities of
distributed work to the older generation (also, shouldn’t there be a
grandfather cloud too? Old men could teach kids how to chop wood
and rebuild car engines with a single spanner).
A few English grandmothers clearly won’t solve the education
crisis in the developing world. Massive investment is needed, along
with stable governments, school buildings and, of course, food and
clean water. There are also big, ambitious technology projects, like
the one child per laptop³ scheme. But even so, the Granny Cloud
shows that with a broadband connection and a committed crowd you
can make a difference, right now, to the lives of children almost anywhere in the world.
1. Sugata Mitra - The Child Driven Education - TED.com
bit.ly/bi1OM4
2. Microtask article in this book: Are the golden years history
3. One Laptop Per Child
one.laptop.org/
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December 2010 by Ville Miettinen
Crowdsourcing Crime Part I:
The Good Guys
From Sherlock Holmes to Philip Marlowe, great detectives have
generally been diehard loners. Never, even when faced with the
most mind-mangling mystery do they shout out for help from the
crowd. Which makes me wonder how my favorite fictional P.Is
would have coped with the recent rise of international, crowd-based
crime fighters.
Sleuths in Seattle
If the police force in Seattle is anything to go by, it seems my fictional, loner P.Is are more a fairy-tale than reality. According to this
local news report¹, far from preferring to work alone, cops in the
home of grunge and dubious romantic comedy have been quick to
embrace the crowd.
Not content with their 7000 regular Twitter followers, Seattle
police have launched Getyourcarback on Twitter. Police post details
of stolen vehicles (plates, color, make and model etc) online, hoping
the crowd will spot and report back if they see the cars. If it works,
the scheme could be extended to descriptions of crime suspects and
traffic alerts.
World Police
Intrigued, I probed a little further (did a Google search): turns out
the rise of the smart phones with GPS location has led to a surge
in crime spotting apps, mostly in the US. Projects like Postacrime,
SpotCrime and Crime Reports all use tips from the crowd to map
criminal activity. Working with thousands of law enforcement agencies Crime Reports is definitely the most ambitious of the gang. The
app uses the crowd, not just to report crime, but to analyze data and
form online neighborhood watch groups in local areas.
In Kenya – one of the most tech-savvy African nations – a project
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called Hatari allows the citizens of Nairobi to submit reports and
locations of crime and corruption to a website via text, tweet or web
form. It’s built on the celebrated Ushahidi platform and founders
are working with backers to get a short code that’ll make texting
reports free.
If you live in Seattle or Atlanta then crowdsourced crime reporting is just one more nugget of data into the vast melting pot of police
reports, databases and web apps available. In Nairobi though, Hatari
is one of the first attempts to build a publically available, visual,
crime database. And it’s not without risks either – I can’t imagine
corrupt Kenyan cops take too kindly to having their photo snapped
in the middle of trying to harass you.
With the crowd taking more and more steps to fight crime, perhaps it’s time for a new kind of detective too. A nerdy P.I who solves
cases from his bedroom with nothing more than his wits, an iPhone
and a massive Twitter following? Maybe it’s not quite bestseller
material…
1. Sara Jean Green - Your stolen vehicle may be just a tweet away
- The Seattle Times
bit.ly/fcyaBw
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January 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Crowdsourcing crime part II:
the net has eyes
Along with tea, politeness and Prince William, one of the things
the U.K is famous for is CCTV. These days the streets and shopping
malls of London are heaving with surveillance cameras.
Nobody knows how many there are, but it’s generally agreed
Britain is one of the most watched countries in the world. You have
to wonder what this nation of polite tea-drinkers would do if they
turned all the cameras off: loot Oxford Street? Storm Buckingham
palace? Queue jump?
Okay, fun as laughing at the Brits is, I do have a point here. CCTV
only works if someone’s watching at the other end. With such a massive network of cameras, there aren’t enough professionals to monitor every feed and, in any case, small businesses struggle to pay for
full time security.
See it, report it!
Step forward Internet Eyes (with a name like that it’s like they’re trying to sound creepy). Subscribers pay £13 (around $20) a year and
get access to live video feeds from convenience store cameras. Every
crime you spot earns points, get enough points and there’s money to
be made – up to £1000 for the top spotter each month.
The idea of net-based surveillance isn’t popular with everyone.
What if an Internet Eye subscriber was racist, or particularly disliked old ladies with small dogs? Might they issue alerts which lead
to innocent people getting harassed? Does giving out rewards make
people too keen to see crime?
In the U.S they’ve gone one further. Texas Police have set up cameras specifically for net watchers to virtually patrol the Mexican border. There’s no money involved this time, the crowd does it out of
sheer patriotic duty.
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Gaming the system
Human rights issues aside, there’s been some fascinating stuff written on the idea of turning dull, repetitive jobs – like monitoring CCTV
feeds – into more exciting, game-like experiences. At Seriosity, a
consultancy that aims to get more gaming into work, they’ve experimented with inserting realistic looking, dummy bad guys into live
video feeds, so security guards constantly have something to look out
for, becoming more alert and engaged.
And if you can insert game mechanics into work, why not insert
a little work into games? A stint watching camera feeds could
become an optional level in online games, with virtual gold, points
or level rewards.
The crowd is watching
The idea of a huge crowd of online informants, ruthlessly alerting
the police to any hint of suspicious behavior isn’t exactly comforting
(Snapscouts¹ is a neat of satire on the whole idea of getting rewards
for ratting people out). But the sheer number of apps and sites show
there’s a genuine desire from the crowd to get involved in crime prevention. It’s up to the innovators – the people who dream up and
design these apps, to make sure it’s always really the bad guys who
the crowd ends up going after.
1. SnapScouts - Crowdsourcing Crime Prevention
snapscouts.org/
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December 2010 by Ville Miettinen
Caught on Camera:
the crowd calls the shots
One of the reoccurring complaints about our shiny, super-connected
modern world is that everywhere has become a bit samey. From
Moscow to L.A. it seems like everyone’s drinking Starbucks, eating
pizza and tweeting about WikiLeaks from their iPhones.
Such generic experiences can lead previously well-adjusted
people to suddenly book crazy adventure holidays trekking in the
Sahara, or start spending hours on Google maps trying to get Street
View in Outer Mongolia.
But, thanks to film director Kevin MacDonald, help is at hand for
those afflicted with globalization frustration. Clearly not immune to
the travel bug himself (credits include the Ugandan based Last King
of Scotland and Touching the Void, set in the Peruvian Andes), for
his latest film Kevin has chosen to sit back and let the crowd show
him a whole new world.
A 5000 hour day later
Life In A Day is a feature length film created entirely from crowdsourced footage. The concept is simple: one day in the life of the
world. Anyone with a video camera can upload film of their day –
wherever they are, whatever they happen to be doing – onto the Life
In A Day YouTube channel.
To make sure he didn’t only get material from the camera-phone
addicted West, MacDonald sent over 400 video cameras out to people in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
And what do you get if you issue an open call for life on earth?
Over 5000 hours of film, from professionally shot, stunning photography to shaky mobile phone clips. Time for the project’s 80 professional editors to knuckle down for a caffeine-fuelled month of trawling through footage…
The finished product (due to be screened at Sundance next year)
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is still emerging. But the trailer and video galleries, with their combination of the shocking, sublime, ridiculous, tragic and mundane,
leave you in no doubt about the astounding variety of modern
human experience.
The crowd’s work is never done
The combination of clear directorial vision and crowd enthusiasm
can give some pretty stunning results. Take an earlier example called
Mass Animation¹ (a project which surely deserves an award for sheer
geekdom): an old school crowdsourcing competition that got amateur
animators to breathe new life into their favorite DC comic characters.
While Life In A Day is already an ambitious project, why not have
the crowd go further? How about letting them help with the editing
process? YouTube already has a ranking system for video clips. It
would be simple to let the crowd select the most watched or most
liked footage, narrowing clips down from say, 5000 to 500 hours in
an initial edit.
Film makers uploading clips to Life In A Day are asked to tag their
work (funny, sad, monkey plays drums etc) to make it easier to categorize. Long term this means the project won’t just produce a crowdsourced feature film, but also a massive, pre-catalogued database
of open-source video clips. A unique resource that will be available
to future film makers, journalists and academic researchers. Not to
mention iPhone addicts, while they wait for their Starbucks.
1. Mass Animation
massanimation.com/
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December 2010 by Ville Miettinen
Making news pay:
a pressing issue
The newspaper business has always had a bit of a love-hate relationship with the web. On the one hand, reporters now have instant
access to the most magnificent research tool ever known to mankind.
On the other hand, so does everybody else. Since 2007 an avalanche
of free, online new sites (oh, and a global recession) have caused
newspaper sales to plummet in the US and Europe.
Of course, some quality publications have managed to stay profitable through online advertising, but in general, making money online
hasn’t proved easy for your average hardworking media mogul (witness Rupert Murdoch ranting at search engines¹). In an age where
information is as prolific as a Nigerian email scam, is there anything
the papers can do to get the crowd to pay for news?
War of the walls
The obvious solution is paywalls. Papers which appeal to the business community such as the Wall Street Journal and the Financial
Times have had paywalls for a while, but it is Rupert Murdoch
that has taken them to the masses with papers such as The Times
(London’s oldest daily). This seems to be a trend, with the New York
Times recently announcing plans to join its UK namesake in 2011 .
But is such an extreme measure, effectively blocking news out of
the web altogether, really the best way for journalists to support their
families?
Sponsor a reporter
Answer, perhaps not. These days crowdfunding isn’t just for starryeyed, indie bands. Serious, investigative journalists – crucial to
a working democracy, but also awfully expensive – have started
appealing directly to their readership. Political cartoonist and writer
Ted Rall² raised $26,000 so he could travel to, and report on the
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situation in, Afghanistan (not a move we’d recommend unless you’re
an experienced foreign reporter).
Beyond such one-off projects is Spot.us, a news site entirely built
on crowdfunded journalism. Reporters pitch a story, readers decide
whether to invest. Finished stories are displayed (for free), and sold
on whenever possible, with any profits go back to the crowdfunders.
Spot.us doesn’t just want your money, they want the crowd in on
the action. Citizens can give suggestions of topics they’d like to see
covered, and team up with reporters to help them complete assignments. The project even has its own little corner of distributed work
(aww): if you can’t afford to donate money to the site, you can earn
spot $ doing tasks for the site’s partner organizations.
Taking the news to task
I admit, reporters (not to speak of editors and owners) on more
established newspapers might not like the idea of being told what to
write by the crowd. But, if more and more “quality” news is going to
end up behind walls, couldn’t The Times and co. at least give readers
another way of getting through?
How about this: instead of paying for access (£1 per day for The
Times), you could perform some microtasks? The majority of readers in the “developed” world – cash rich, time poor – would probably
choose to pay the money rather than do the time. But in developing
nations the tasks might seem quite attractive.
Personally, I suspect paywalls will end up as just one more ingredient in the online melting-pot of free, crowdsourced and paid-for journalism. Quality news is expensive to produce and must be paid for
somehow. If they want to survive the information age, the grand old
men of news might do worse than look to the crowd for a few ideas.
1. Alistair Dawber - Murdoch blasts search engine ‘kleptomaniacs’
- The Independent
ind.pn/2GY75D
2. Ted Rall - Comix Journalism - Kickstarter.com
kck.st/ygc0UM
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November 2010 by Ville Miettinen
How many microtasks does it
take to change the world?
Bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell managed to set the cat among
the tweeters recently. Writing in the New Yorker he argues¹ that
‘new tools of social media’ are powerless as a force for activism or
social change.
The (strong) ties that bind
Real, high risk, sustained activism is only possible, says Gladwell,
when the activists are connected by strong ties. He takes the U.S.
Civil Rights movement as his main example. The activists who stuck
around and took risks had personal connections – friends and family
also dedicated to the cause. A sort of morally virtuous form of peer
pressure.
In contrast Facebook and Twitter are vast, unstructured networks. They generate weak ties. Great if you want to keep an eye on
your college friends’ favorite flavors of ice-cream, not so great if you
need to overthrow a brutal regime.
It’s a compelling case. Even if, (as others have pointed out²)
Gladwell does take shots at some pretty easy targets – like the so
called ‘twitter revolutions’ in Moldova and Iran.
Can I click it?
One of Gladwell’s major complaints is that social networks “are only
effective at increasing participation by lessening the level of motivation that participation requires.” Okay, so clearly social change
does require more than just answering an e-petition or clicking ‘Like’
on Facebook. But what if we could find innovative ways to channel
people’s desire to participate? If new technology could make it easier
to make a real difference, would that be such a bad thing?
Imagine it’s 1960 and you happen to be a French Creole speaker
living in Sydney. One day, you read there’s been a massive earthquake
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in Haiti. Of course you want to help but, besides mailing a check,
what can you do? In 1960, in order to participate, you’d have needed
the motivation to quit your job, leave your family and fly out to Haiti.
Fast forward to 2010 and, thanks to the folks at Ushahidi, all you
need to translate urgent messages from Haiti is an Internet connection and a mobile phone.
And then there’s the growing phenomenon of micro volunteering. Like the Sparked (formerly the Extraordinaries) network, micro
volunteering organizations take projects from non-profit organizations and divide the work into (you’ve guessed it) microtasks, which
are distributed to a crowd of skilled volunteers. Projects range from
the global mapping of defibrillator locations, to helping improve the
website of a domestic violence charity in California. In two years,
Sparked has signed up 32,000 volunteers who together have completed over 325,000 tasks.
In fairness to Mr Gladwell (who I’m sure is a dedicated follower
of our blog), I’m not discussing the vast social networks he criticizes.
Maybe he’d tell me that crowdsourced volunteers are still too weakly
tied to cause dramatic social change. Perhaps it might be a bit much
to expect microtasking to bring about the revolution, but while we
wait, it might just help to get some good stuff done.
1. Malcolm Gladwell - Small Change - The New Yorker
nyr.kr/bYKeLq
2. Leo Mirani - Sorry, Malcolm Gladwell, the revolution may well be tweeted
- The Guardian
bit.ly/bFo4jQ
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October 2010 by Ville Miettinen
Shining a light on
local government
Recently, after long days at work, I find myself cursing the Government.
It’s not that I’m an anarchist, or because I am particularly upset
about taxes or government policy. What annoys me is the streetlight
outside my house.
Last month, after a brief, flickering illness, it died. Without its
guiding light, fitting my key into the door to my apartment building
has become an annoying game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.
To be fair, the issue is probably not incompetence on the part of
the Government, but rather ignorance of my particular problem. I
suspect my local council is as in the dark about it metaphorically as
I am literally. If I could only be bothered ringing them to make them
aware of the broken lamp, I’m sure it would be eventually fixed.
Like all citizens in fully developed democracies, I am fortunate
to have the freedom to make demands of the government – even if
I don’t get around to actually making them. In this case, as soon as
I manage to unlock the door my annoyance subsides rapidly, and
finding the right person to contact and calling them seems like far
too much hassle.
Everything is illuminated
Happily, such annoyances may soon be a thing of the past. New methods of sharing information and allocating tasks – such as crowdsourcing – mean that difficult or time consuming jobs can be broken into
bite sized microtasks. Numerous organizations are now using such
platforms, together with the internet, to facilitate user-friendly and
effective interaction between citizens and their governments.
A good example is Fixmystreet, run by mySociety in the UK. Now
in England, when a pothole makes you spill your coffee all over yourself, rather than writing a letter to your local MP, you simply log the
problem on an online map. It is then automatically forwarded to the
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appropriate government employee.
Such websites not only allow the public to easily notify the government of issues, the publicity they generate also pressures bureaucrats to resolve the issues quickly. At the time of writing 1,878 problems logged on Fixmystreet had been fixed in the last month alone.
Another example is Project Fosbury.¹ Also run by mySociety, it is
a wider project intent on bringing people together to solve everyday
problems like those dealt to by Fixmystreet.
Project Fosbury is a modular platform that breaks down complicated civic tasks into pieces which can then be allocated to one or
more people. Each task is completed within a joined up infrastructure and is designed to be easy and satisfying for someone who’s
never engaged politically before. Driving the success are incentive
structures, peer pressure, and a sense of fun.
The possible applications for this sort of transparent interaction
between citizens and their governments are widespread and are
increasing all the time. I’m not suggesting that such developments
will suddenly make governments perfect, but they will certainly
improve it, by increasing transparency, efficiency and accountability. By encouraging interaction between government and citizens
they are bringing government out of the dark ages. Such interaction,
I hope, may be the key to solving many of life’s little annoyances.
1. Tom Steinberg - mySociety’s Next 12 Months - mysociety.org
bit.ly/8ZP0jl
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G A M I
F I C A
T I O N
+1
00
1 UP
?
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August 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Heather Chaplin:
gamification’s
worst nightmare?
This year has been huge for gamification. Barely a day passes without another story about it in the media, with its champions enjoying
so much exposure to the spotlight they had suntans long before summer. We were no exception. Here on the blog we’ve cover the topic
from several angles: sometimes with unashamed enthusiasm, and
sometimes discussing concerning aspects of the field (much of this
discussion can be found in this section of the book).
For some time now, Jane McGonigal has been hailed as gamification’s greatest ambassador. But so far, what the gamified battlefield
has been missing is a real and credible anti-gamification champion.
Reality fights back
Step forward Heather Chaplin. Ms Chaplin is no videogame hater,
quite the opposite. She’s the author of popular gaming history book
Smartbomb and has worked as a videogame journalist for The New
York Times, The Los Angeles Times and GQ.
Chaplin is a fan of grown-up gaming (less “kill the zombies” more
“design public healthcare for the zombies”). Back in 2009, she made
big waves at GDC when she accused game-developers of being “a
bunch of stunted adolescents”.¹ Her views on gamification are
equally controversial. In an article published in Slate earlier this year,
Chaplin claimed that (despite her epic enthusiasm) Jane McGonigal
is not advocating any concrete change but only a change in perception: adding game mechanisms to reality just to simulate feelings
of satisfaction. In Chaplin’s opinion gamification will not work
in the long run because it fails to solve people’s underlying problems. No amount of points or power-ups can compensate for jobs
being shipped overseas, stagnant wages and unfair taxation. Chaplin
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continues: “it’s no wonder corporations are so excited about turning the world into a game. One of the movement’s central insights
is that a sense of accomplishment sometimes feels more meaningful
than a paycheck”.
Gaming for the greater good
I can see that Chaplin has a point, maybe the power of game-mechanics has been over-hyped. But her article makes gamification sound
like a giant, evil corporate conspiracy. She ignores the hundreds of
examples of “good-will” gamification: people engaging with games
on a totally voluntary basis, where contributing to the cause is the
compensation. Think of leaving a tip on Foursquare after dining in
an exceptional restaurant: that’s something I’ve done several times,
not for the points or badges but because I just enjoy free drinks
reviewing places. Closer to home there are the thousands of volunteers who’ve contributed to digitizing Finland’s National Library by
playing the games we developed for Digitalkoot.
While the views of Heather Chaplin go hand in hand with the
complaints of graphic designers,² they don’t take into account that
gamification works on many levels and for many different products
and platforms. So where should we draw the line? Is gamification
just another “stunted adolescent” or is the concept capable of growing-up? We hope to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
1. GDC 09: Game Critics Rant at the Industry - Ign.com
bit.ly/idGriE
2. Mike Isaac - Why Designers Hate Crowdsourcing - Forbes.com
onforb.es/bPvPj1
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April 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Gaming the system:
how rewards affect
performance
Sometimes the simplest things are the hardest to define. Everyone
knows what a game is, but agreeing on a definition is another story.
Wikipedia’s no-nonsense entry defines a game as: “structured playing, usually undertaken for enjoyment…with goals, challenges, rules
and interactions.” Jesse Schell is somewhat more fun, saying it is simply “a problem solving activity, approached with a playful attitude”.
Although not mentioned in these definitions, a key part of many
games is rewards. Checkmate the king – win a chess trophy; explode
a bad guy – collect the coins (plus if it’s multiplayer, you get the
added buzz of annihilating friends and family).
While such reward systems seem straightforward, the rationale behind them can be incredibly complicated. Should rewards be
physical or emotional? Intrinsic or extrinsic? Predictable level-ups
or unpredictable Easter eggs? With the rapid spread of gamification
into business, developing reward systems that entice people to play
is becoming an important industry.
It’s not about the money
Common sense (and free market economics) suggests that the relationship between productivity and rewards should be simple and linear. Say you pay a worker X dollars in return for Y output. Double the
dollars and you’d expect to double the output (2X = 2Y). Or so you’d
think. But interestingly it appears that in many cases productivity is
one of those things money just can’t buy.
Dan Pink¹ argues that increasing rewards only increases productivity when workers are performing repetitive, mechanical tasks (in
my opinion, even then you can run into problems). Unbelievably,
when it comes to creative or complex tasks, monetary incentives can
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actually damage people’s productivity (maybe this explains why so
many second albums disappoint).
Mr Pink makes a compelling case. He quotes 30 years of research
into employee motivation. Tests and studies have been carried out
all over the world by universities including MIT and the LSE. All the
data points to the same conclusion, that “once a task calls for even
rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward leads to poorer performance.” This, of course, has serious repercussions for gamified
incentive schemes.
A badge too far
Gamification usually works by layering game-like rewards over existing
sites and concepts. You take something people are already intrinsically
interested in and use gaming to give the service an “engagement boost”.
Can companies assume that the more points they hand out, the
more customers they’ll attract?
The answer may depend on how well the reward system is
designed. To work, reward structures have to be carefully planned,
customized and implemented. Just slapping points and leader
boards on everything that clicks can actually damage a brand. If
badges are too easy or too difficult to obtain then users get bored
or frustrated. If a points system can be easily gamed then lessloyal (dishonest) users are rewarded over loyal (honest) ones.
Plus, users engaged in creative tasks may feel patronized / irritated/ homicidal if forced to work using a cute, bug-eyed avatar.
So far, very few gamifiers have addressed Dan Pink’s evidence on
the dangers of relying on rewards as motivators. As companies start
applying gamification to more complex, creative tasks the question
is, will virtual dollars be any better than real ones at encouraging
productivity?
1. Dan Pink - Surprising science of motivation - TED.com
bit.ly/nzmRH
2. By 2015, More Than 50 Percent of Organizations That Manage Innovation
Processes Will Gamify Those Processes - Gartner.com
bit.ly/dMwY8P
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March 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Science and the “Nobel”
art of gaming
As regular readers will know, here at Microtask we love a bit of science fun. A good example is Foldit (discussed later in this section), a
freely-available online protein-folding game. Foldit players contribute directly to scientific discovery: the more proteins they fold, the
closer scientists get to curing diseases like Alzheimer’s and AIDS.
Refusing to be out-innovated by mere protein professors, geneticists at Carnegie Mellon and Stanford University have created EteRNA.
EteRNA is another folding game: this time the goal is to help create
the first large-scale library of synthetic RNA designs (which sounds
like you’re studying for a PhD as opposed to playing a puzzle game).
It doesn’t take a genius to see that gamification is getting a totally
new crowd interested in scientific experiments. So what’s the next
step? Instead of creating games that model biological processes,
what if scientists started “playing” with actual molecules?
Microscopic evolution, real life fun
That’s exactly what Stanford researcher Ingmar Riedel-Kruse and his
lab group have done. The Biotic Games project enables players to interact directly with microorganisms. The game’s “hardware” is a simple
console which is hooked up to a lab slide. When players push buttons
on the console the microorganisms on the slide react. These reactions
are displayed onscreen in real-time via a microscopic camera.
So far, the team has come up with several varieties of protozoabased fun, such as: PAC Mecium allows players to move paramecia
around by controlling electrical fields. Biotic Pinball lets you influence the direction of microorganisms by injecting chemicals onto the
lab slide. Polymer Race has players betting on the fastest reactions
among millions of copies of an organism’s DNA.
Like many great science projects, Biotic Games was created out of
intellectual curiosity (the “let’s see what happens if we try this” impulse)
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rather than for any specific application. Riedel-Kruse hopes that:
“By playing games involving biology on a scale too small to see
with the naked eye, people will realize how amazing these processes
are… We are talking about microbiology with these games, very
primitive life forms.”
At this point, the actual game-play of Biotic Games is still very
basic (plus players need an inconveniently expensive biotechnology lab to run the system). However, with a bit of development
(and maybe a decent game designer), there’s definitely potential for
crowdsourced “biotic tasks”.
Console campaigners
Medicine and science are not the only fields that could benefit from gamified crowdsourcing. Back in 2008 Steve Puma showcased Macrocosm,
the “climate change simulation game that lets you save the earth”.
Puma’s concept was a game that allowed users and companies to work
together to solve complex climate change and social problems.
Developers behind the recently released game Fate of the World¹
would definitely agree that climate change is ideal gamification
material. A single-player strategy game, Fate of The World encourages players to explore serious political and social issues. Unlike
many “message-focused” platforms, Fate of the World is a game you
actually want to play: complex, immersive and visually appealing.
Both Biotic Games and Fate of the World have huge crowdsourcing
potential, especially if they borrow a few ideas from each other. Fate
of the World could develop ways to interact with real world processes
– allowing the crowd to suggest concrete solutions to global problems.
Biotic Games could adopt more high-spec, mainstream game-play in
order to attract a bigger crowd to medical research tasks.
It’s still very early days for scientific crowdsourced gamification.
But the beauty of science is that a sudden, critical discovery is always
possible. Who knows, one day there really might be a Nobel prize
winning crowd.
1. Fate of the World - Tipping Point
fateoftheworld.net
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March 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
A ticket to play
San Francisco is a great place to be a geek. The city is home to hundreds of startups including big names like Twitter, Craigslist and
Zynga. Silicon Valley itself is just 50km round the bay.
Every year thousands of tech-seeking tourists cross the Golden
Gate Bridge to attend events: the Game Developers Conference,
Apple Keynotes, the Web 2.0 Summit – there’s an expo for everyone.
In such a tech-friendly town, it’s not surprising that computing is
spreading into public spaces, affecting the way citizens interact with
their urban environment. The first stop? That most boring of public
places: the bus stop.
Routed to the stop
In late 2010 large touch screens were installed in 20 bus stops
across San Francisco (with a little help from Yahoo). To liven-up
that tedious wait for the bus, the screens run simple games and
applications involving trivia, puzzles and good old fashioned alien
annihilation.
Although the games themselves are pretty basic (more Pacman
than PS3 stuff), from a gamification perspective this is exciting stuff.
The bus stop screens have a built-in social networking system, enabling different neighborhoods to compete against each other. After a
tough fight, the world’s first Bus Stop Derby¹ was won by the inhabitants (addicts) of North Beach, who completed an impressive total
of 150,000 games.
The “geeky and proud” residents of San Francisco are clearly having fun (though probably not getting to work on time), but the bus
stop initiative also has serious microwork potential. With a smart set
up, a wide range of companies could use task-based games in similar
situations. In addition to the addictive, competitive element of the
games, people could be encouraged to participate using incentives
such as free fares for completing a set number of microwork tasks.
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Gaming the city
The bus stop experiment also shows that it’s possible to use technology to modify people’s perception of everyday experiences. In
Helsinki, the massive Jätkäsaari redevelopment project has surprisingly similar aims (plus a handy €60 million of investment money). As
well as creating eco-friendly architecture, a key part of the Jätkäsaari
project is changing consumer behavior: the idea is that visual stimuli
and well-designed user interfaces can get people to interact with their
environment in new ways.
Jean-Christopher Zoel, project leader for Experientia, one of the
companies designing Jätkäsaari, believes that “people, their contexts, social networks, habits and beliefs are crucial tools for creating sustainable changes in behavior. We will therefore offer people
ways to control their consumption and see the effect of their actions
on the environment”.
In San Francisco, “gamifiers” are limited by the city’s established
systems and infrastructure. Jätkäsaari is a clean slate – an opportunity for some real blue-sky thinking. Through Digitalkoot, Microtask
has already shown how the gamification of crowdsourcing and
microwork can be used to save precious text archives. Why not go
further? You could potentially turn almost anywhere into an interactive space: bus stops, train stations, airports – all the places where
people are usually terribly bored. If you can’t take the crowd to the
interface, maybe it’s time to start taking interfaces to the crowd.
1. OK Go Free Rooftop Concert - sfstation.com
bit.ly/glp6Fs
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December 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Revenge of the gamers: an epic
win for the world
“An ‘epic win’ is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive,
you had no idea it was even possible before you achieved it.” Jane
McGonigal
As a teenager, I found most adults just couldn’t see the point
of videogames. My own parents never seemed to grasp that games
had moved on since the days of Pong and Space Invaders. Despite
the obvious coolness of my virtual worlds, mom would perpetually
storm up to my room and start yelling about irritating trivia like
“school work”, “doing your chores”, and the so called “real world”
waiting outside the damn door.
Now, at last, game designer and researcher Jane McGonigal¹
has finally given me the argument I so desperately needed as a child
(given I started with a Commodore 16 at age five, it’s been a long
wait). Playing games can now help to save the real world.
Massive, multiplayer and misunderstood
Jane McGonigal argues that, far from the stereotype of the slackjawed loner, videogame players are, in fact, engaged, active and
motivated to collaborate with each other. Basically, gamers are better at operating in their virtual lives than most people are in their
real ones (ignoring the bloodthirsty, megalomaniac nature of their
virtual personas, of course).
The statistics are astounding. Globally, every week, people spend
the equivalent of 3 billion days playing games. Since it was released
in 2004, World of Warcraft devotees alone have racked up 5.93 million years of game play. The average young person, growing up in a
game-playing country, will have spent 10,000 hours playing by the
time they reach 21. It’s a whole parallel line of education, one that
goes almost unnoticed by high schools and colleges.
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Deep impacts
In his book Outliers, Malcom Gladwell claims (now here’s a coincidence) that 10,000 hours of study is exactly the time it takes to become
an expert in virtually any job or discipline. But if that’s the case, what
exactly is it that 500 million gamers worldwide are so good at?
Jane McGonigal has some answers. Gamers are extremely selfmotivated, able to weave tight-knit social networks, good at working hard (and enjoying it!) and addicted to “epic meaning” – great
stories, in other words. This powerful mix creates a breed of superempowered, hopeful individuals. The problem is, they think that
they can only change virtual worlds, not the real one. (Blame their
parents for this).
So the question is, how do we get gamers to use their phenomenal
skill set and motivation to solve real world problems? The answer is
simple: we create world-changing games for them to play. With a little help from videogame theorist Edward Castronova, that’s exactly
what Jane McGonigal has set out to do.
One of her recent pilots, created in collaboration with the Institute
for the Future, was the Superstruct Game.² Superstruct works like
massively multiplayer disaster movie – a crowd of gamers play
together to invent solutions (superstructures) to crises that threaten
the planet – from fuel shortages to the global exodus of refugees.
Far from being addicted to a “time wasting hobby” McGonigal’s
work shows that gamers are a crowd of experts, ready, waiting and willing to use their skills to create epic wins for the future of the real world.
All of which finally allows me to prove my parents wrong – real life
isn’t just outside the door, it’s flickering onscreen, right in front of us.
1. Jane McGonigal - Gaming can make a better world - TED.com
bit.ly/aDmAYR
2. Supersruct! Play the game, invent the future - itft.org
iftf.org/node/2098
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May 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Why making the crowd
smart is a no-brainer
I’m sure it’s happened to you. Sometimes I get it when I can’t sleep.
Other times it happens if I wake up suddenly: I catch my brain redhanded elaborating concepts and ideas without my permission.
Whether it’s the echo of a dream which still maintains its shape,
some sort of eureka moment coming out of nowhere, or just the side
effect of a hard to digest dinner, the results are often surprisingly
fruitful: I guess this is why great thinkers like Jerry Seinfeld keep a
notepad by their beds. Sure, there are times where it would be nice
to disconnect from the world and just get some rest, but I am not
going to complain if my brain keeps searching for answers while I’m
lying face down on bed. If nothing else it gives me an excuse to sleep
in occasionally.
The other night, just as I was drifting off to sleep, I had just such a
moment of enlightenment. I realized that something I’ve been wishing for – mini-games that multitudes of people around the world
could play within one complex, overarching game – already exist.
Well, almost.
My epiphany relates to the brain child of the now famous Dr.
Ryuta Kawashima. In 2003 the good Doctor wrote a book called
Train Your Brain: 60 Days to a Better Brain. The book, containing
simple mathematical calculations intermingled with memory tests
and counting tests, was a smash hit around the world.
Nintendo, well recognized for its efforts to expand the gaming
demographic, decided to produce a game based on the book and,
with the help of Kawashima himself (appearing as a guiding character in the game), released in 2005 a title known on PAL territories as Brain Training: How Old is Your Brain? By May 2010, the
game and its sequel together have sold a staggering 33 million copies
worldwide.
The effectiveness of brain training exercises has had a lot of press
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recently, after a large study¹ indicated that any improvements in
cognitive functioning apply only to the specific exercises practiced.
Aside from this longstanding debate over whether or not they actually work, what I found interesting about Brain Training is that,
in practice, the exercises people perform to give their gray matter
a work-out are very close to the kind of micro tasks crowdsourcing
platforms could use to help other industries redistribute their workloads. Among others, Brain Training exercises include calculations,
quick reading, counting syllables and keeping track of elements on
screen: all operations easily transferable to other fields.
As I discuss in the following post, masking work snippets as minigames could lead to radically different pricing models for games. In
the case of educational software such as Brain Training (and also
applying to quiz games such as Buzz! and language software like
English Training²) the structure is already there, requiring only few
tweaks to make them serve a radically different purpose. If game
designers get together with crowdsourcing experts and integrate
the two concepts, in the next years we could see the emergence of
computer based activities that are rewarding for players and businesses simultaneously. These activities would be fun, educational
and productive.
Now if only someone out there was smart enough to put my idea
into practice… As for me, I should really get some sleep.
1. Adam Rutheford - Brain-training games don’t work - The Guardian
bit.ly/d7PNHd
2. English Training - Nintendolife.com
bit.ly/GSddCg
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April 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Play the game of life
For our ancestors, farming and violence were a big part of life. In
order to survive, the only thing more important than finding dinner
was avoiding becoming someone else’s. Happily today, life is much
easier. Despite what the media says, society is considerably safer
than ever before. And at least in rich countries, only a tiny fraction
of the population is needed to toil in the fields to produce our food.
Soldiers of fortune
But this trend, it seems, only applies to the real world. In the virtual
world – perhaps to satisfy our primordial urges – warfare and farming are booming. According to Geekologie¹, with 11m subscribers,
there are more people playing the MMOG (massively multi-player
online game) World of Warcraft than there are living in New York
City. Together the 4.5m European and North American subscribers
generate over $800m in revenue each year. The North Americans
manage to spend on average 22 hours a week playing the game, only
13 hours short of the typical working week.
But just as in the history of the real world, the number of people
involved in virtual war pales in comparison with the number of virtual farmers. Farmville, a Facebook application where people grow
crops and sell them at market, has a staggering 82m users, equivalent to more than 1% of the world’s population. If last year’s trends
continued, one day soon there would be more virtual farmers in the
world than real farmers.
While there are many different theories for the phenomenal success of Farmville, most relate to the social aspects of the game. A.J.
Patrick Liszkiewicz argues “the secret to Farmville’s popularity is
neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because it
entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into
Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them
gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’
farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies.” This
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social aspect is encouraged by the fees: unless you want to pay for
the pleasure of growing imaginary crops, to play you must have at
least other eight friends helping you out.
Making hay while the sun shines
Despite the huge popularity of these games, the gaming industry
as a whole has fallen on hard times.² For every incredible success
story, there are a many more failures or only marginally profitable
games. For a developer, creating a game as financially successful and
popular as World of Warcraft is incredibly difficult and expensive:
the 1,400 locations, 30,000 items, 5,300 non-playing characters and
7,600 quests in the World of Warcraft were built over the years by
a team of only 150 developers, requiring significant investment with
statistically little probability of success.
With declining profitability, game designers have had to think of
creative ways to make money. In Farmville if you want to buy virtual
goods, you can either spend hours tilling the fields like an 18th century peasant, or you can use real money to bypass this deliberately
repetitive labor. Rather than subscription fees, it is the sale of virtual goods that are the main source of its creator Zynga’s estimated
$250m income. These micropayments can be made via PayPal,
credit card, Pay by Mobile, Boku, Spare Change or by completing a
reward offer (such as taking part in a survey).
Reward offers, which are usually created for advertising or focus
testing purposes, are conflicting with the game developer’s interest
because of the way they detract from the main experience.
Getting the farmers back to work
In another post, I described how a little bit of game design could make
even a repetitive job more interesting. Let’s now consider the opposite case: how can we integrate tasks into games and create a win-win
situation both for players and the company running the game?
It seems to me that many players who are unable or unwilling to
pay a subscription, or sustain the ongoing expenses required to run
a virtual farm would be willing to carry out tasks in exchange for
virtual (or real) currency. The challenge for designers is to “mask”
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the little work snippets, integrating them with the rest of the game. If
this were possible, lucrative tasks related to tagging, recognition and
association could quite easily be integrated into mini-games, even
when they come from fields traditionally unrelated to gaming.
Along with boosting profits, such tasks could also reduce costs
by contributing to the content of the game. Imagine, for example, if
players of a game like World of Warcraft could help plan locations,
design items or create quests: 150 developers created the game in its
entirety, what if they could efficiently mobilize the 11m users?
Survival of the fittest
Getting it right, of course, is very tricky. In-game advertising, for
example, struggled for years to find a working formula, and has only
recently started to gain acceptance and importance. Nonetheless,
figuring out innovative business models which will encourage contributions from players who are reluctant to open their wallets is something that companies developing multiplayer or social games should
consider as soon as they sit around a table to discuss a new project.
Charles Darwin reputedly said that “it is not the strongest of
the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most
responsive to change.” As anyone who has ever toiled in the rather
dull Farmville fields will tell you, this applies to the creators of virtual world just as it does to the real. Only gaming companies who
adapt to the new world will survive.
1. The Unbelievable World of Warcraft - geekologie.com
bit.ly/9jv1CZ
2. 2009 U.S. Video Game Industry and PC Game Software Retail Sales Reach
$20.2 Billion - npd.com
bit.ly/7baK83
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April 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
When worlds collide
While growing up I was something of a god. I don’t mean this in
the sense that I was worshiped by my peers, or excelled at sport or
anything like that. And as far as I know, I never possessed a heavenly mandate or supernatural powers (despite countless attempts
over the years, I have never been able to move objects using only will
power and the Force).
Alas, my divinity was limited to the much more down to earth,
arguably even geeky, reality of old fashioned pen and paper role-play
games. As anyone who has been involved in role-play games knows,
the playing of the game itself is only part of the fun. For those of you
who missed out on this highly entertaining and addictive experience,
here is a brief rundown of the other aspect – the creationism (forgive
me Darwin) required before a game starts.
Let there be light
First, you boldly create new worlds, shape the universe in which
they exist and populate them with fictional people and places.
Next – after breaking for coffee – you write the history, the background, imaginary wars and political struggles of your new worlds.
You define, with great detail, the evolutionary process (this is now
sounding like intelligent design theory) that shaped each creature
and character, and provide them with motivation, goals, obstacles
or simple excuses. Finally, you order your creation with rules. These
provide your universe with internal coherence and logic. Note that
because all of what you have created must obey them, these laws
are more like gravity than the Ten Commandments.
As God and any other role players out there know, it’s a long process (perhaps not quite the five days quoted in The Book of Genesis)
and also an extremely rewarding one.
Creating these complex and believable ecosystems not only takes
a long time, it needs a great deal of imagination and a passion for the
minutiae. This applies whether it’s a pen a paper world or a digital
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one. Just ask the team behind the Mass Effect trilogy (Bioware) how
long it took them to work out how Quarians reproduce through their
antibiotics-stuffed suit, or why for Elcors a simple smile looks more
like a volcanic eruption (be warned – there is no short answer).
Using technology to spread the good news
In the digital age, of course, there is infinitely greater opportunity
to share your worlds with other people – and get paid for them.
While traditional game players like myself (I’m making myself
sound very old here) take great pleasure in the process of creating
our own worlds, I also love exploring those created by others. And as
mobile technology evolves, these worlds are becoming increasingly
accessible.
For years now developers have been trying to create systems
which allow users to play games when physically removed from the
main terminal (usually a PC or a console). Results so far have been
mixed. I could for example name spin offs of popular series, created
especially for mobiles, that were unable to sync with the main chapters. Another disappointment was VMU portable memory cards for
Sega Dreamcast. This allowed gamers to continue to play very limited parts of a wider game on the handheld VMU while away from
the main console, and then sync your efforts with the wider game
when you return to the main console. Conceptually the VMU card
was not far from the digital pet fad Tamagotchi (a similar version of
this has now been resuscitated with the new iteration of Pokemon
for Nintendo DS).
With new advances, such as the recently announced Windows
Mobile 7, Microsoft might have found a way to integrate living room
(or desktop) games with portable devices.¹ However, even taking
for granted the absence of technical barriers, the problem of integrating two very different kind of interaction (desktop and mobile
interfaces) in a coherent gameplay experience remains unsolved.
Dust and Eve
This evolution in mobile gaming is occurring at a time when exciting advances are being made in the varying the scale of gameplay.
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For those of you still reading who are not gamers, you may not have
heard of the much celebrated – at least in gaming circles – EVE
Online. Developed by CCP of Iceland, Eve Online² is a MMOG (massively multi-player online game), with one of the most sophisticated
and detailed sci-fi worlds (outside of those already established universes, such Star Wars or Star Trek, imported from galaxies far far
away like Hollywood).
Although an incredible universe, its appeal was limited to all but
the most enthusiastic science fiction fans due to its level of detail:
EVE Online is also jokingly known as “Excel in Space” for the depth
of its economic and political system. To overcome this, CCP has been
secretly working on a spin off called Dust 514.
Revealed with a stunning launch trailer in December 2009, Dust
514 is an FPS (first person shooter) game based on the same setting
of EVE Online. What makes it innovative is that not only do the two
games share the same world, but they are also connected. In short,
what happens in EVE is reflected on Dust 514 and vice versa. This
opens up amazing gameplay possibilities, with users able to control high-level inter-planetary space warfare but also scale down to
the micro-level of an individual guerrilla soldier on a strategically
important planet.
To control this varied action CCP developed the role of commander in chief: “He’s above the action,” explains the creative
director Atli Már Sveinsson, “but he still has the ability to go into
a voyeur mode and zoom down to see his installations in full 3D. It
may sound removed, but as commander you can influence the battlefield by creating incentives for your players to perform certain
tasks: you’re working towards objectives and moving the focus of
the fighting about.” (EDGE 209)
In games of the future, where the scale will expand or zoomin depending on the situation, it’s not hard to imagine enormous,
highly detailed universes becoming hubs of many different gameplay
experiences rather than just one. Some of these experiences will be
better suited for the sofa (for example deciding overall strategies on
a battlefield), others for the ten minutes spent on a train to reach the
city center (for example contributing on a micro level to an aspect of
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the wider game, such as building barracks).
The point is that all of the users’ experiences will be connected
and meaningful. For this to work, the system will need to be able to
scale tasks and aspects of gameplay according to the terminal accessing the game. In such a scenario, the micro gaming could be effectively crowdsourced to a massive pool of mobile gamers, potentially
creating an enormous, incredibly sophisticated global game.
While getting to this point may require some help from the Force,
it is clear that the gaming experience – especially for those at the
higher, god-like strategic level – would be unparalleled. Indeed, for
those who do not believe in a higher being, it may offer the nearest
thing to a truly religious experience.
1. Microsoft announces Windows Phone 7 Series dev partners and
details apps - endgadget.com
engt.co/aoYV1l
2. EVE Online - One Universe to Explore and Conquer
eveonline.com/
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January 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
The Future of Work:
Paid to Play?
Boredom at work is a big problem. In fact it’s one of the main reasons
people complain about their jobs. Imagine if work could be as entertaining as your favorite game and what this could mean for work
satisfaction and productivity.
The Problem with Work
Many people believe that work is a boring but necessary requirement for enjoying ‘real life’ outside work. This belief is negative
for both employees and employers. A worker who is bored wastes
their time at work waiting for their “real life” to start. Meanwhile an
employer with bored employees loses out on productivity. Let’s face
it – an uninspired worker is more likely to check their Facebook a
hundred times in between coffee breaks than someone who is stimulated by their work.
How Games Could Improve the Situation
If you’re even slightly into games you may have noticed the potential to develop them for purposes other than gaming in its traditional
sense. For example, with a bit of creativity, games requiring players to
perform actions or small tasks (such as MMORPGs or puzzle games)
could be translated into products that could make a real impact.
Game designers use context, art direction and consistent design to
develop compelling games. It is these aspects which make them far
more appealing than your average Excel spreadsheet. Of course that’s
why millions of people choose to spend their “real life” playing them.
So how can we use the fundamentals of game design in the workplace?
Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
A game released over a decade ago provides a good example of how
this shift could occur. Here’s a bit of background on the game for
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those a little less nerdish. Back in 1998 SEGA published House of
the Dead 2. The game first appeared on the dying arcade market as a
light gun shooter and later ported on Dreamcast and PC. The game
was a success. It used top notch graphics and transported players on
a horror ride through a mansion swarming with zombies. Blasting
them was not particularly scary but it required fast reflexes and was
a lot of fun.
A year later a different version of the game was released in a surprising move from SEGA (a company not known for their wise business strategies). The second version was called Typing of the Dead
and was similar to the original but instead of using plastic guns to
ward off zombies, players were required to type words on a keyboard
as fast and as accurately as they could. If the typing was accurate the
player killed a walking corpse and if there were errors the zombies
moved closer. As players progressed words and sentences became
more complex and typing sentences such as “I’m dating the head
cheerleader” while a zombie was trying to eat your brain added
amusement.
Now, imagine a slightly tweaked version of this game using a realtime crowdsourcing system. Let’s say for example that instead of
silly sentences the player is required to type reCAPTCHAs, or input
sentences scanned from ancient manuscripts thus creating digital
versions piece by piece. Wouldn’t that be a terrific way to have people
wanting to work for you?
We will probably never be able to change a broken water pipe
with a customized version of Super Mario, but there is definitely a
recreational potential to work that is just waiting to meet a good
game designer.
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June 2010 by Vili Lehdonvirta
Some work is born digital:
from gold farmers to
game masters
Much has been said about the influence of information technology
on work, and yet little of it has turned out to be overstated. The introduction of personal computers and local area networks to offices
around the developed world in the late 1970s started a revolution in
processes, which later translated to clear and measurable advances
in productivity. The rapid adoption of the Internet since the 1990s
has similarly had a profound influence on the way work is organized and conducted. This influence continues today: the latest step
is a trend towards crowdsourcing, or digitizing existing tasks such
as design and development, and distributing them to a global labor
pool via the Internet.
One aspect of the digitization of work has received less attention
than it perhaps deserves. This aspect is the emergence of work that is
“born digital”. “Born digital” is a term originally used to denote products such as books and music that are created directly in digital form,
as opposed to being digitized versions of analogue materials. It has
also been applied to the generations of consumers who have grown
up with digital technology around them. Both are now so ubiquitous
that they are hardly worth mentioning. But what is less recognized
is that there is now also an increasing variety of work tasks that are
born digital: not just digitally enhanced versions of existing office
and production tasks, but tasks that never even existed before the
penetration of ICT (information and communication technology)
into everyday life.
Digital agriculture and other shady bits
Perhaps the most extreme example of born-digital work is gold farming: harvesting valuable assets inside a massively-multiplayer online
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game and selling them for real money. A similar service is powerleveling, which involves charging a fee for playing another player’s
character, so that the character gains experience points. Another is
boosting, which refers to making one’s own character act as a sort of
bodyguard to another player’s character. Professor Richard Heeks
estimates¹ that at one point these tasks provided employment to as
many as 400,000 individuals around the world. Every aspect of this
work is born digital: it is conducted entirely through digital channels, its fruits are digital, and the demand for it arises from people’s
fascination with digital environments and the goals and objectives
they provide. In sci-fi author Cory Doctorow’s new novel,² gold
farmers even organize into labor unions and become a force in digital politics.
Still, gold farming and its neighboring industries are for a large
part a grey-market activity, often (though not always) taking place
against the wishes of the game operator. Other grey – if not outright
black – market born-digital tasks include defeating tests designed to
prevent spam and resource overuse (CAPTCHAs), and linking/liking/friending individuals and companies in order to enhance their
standings in rankings and search engine results. The latter type of
work is even offered on Amazon Mechanical Turk, one of the earliest crowdsourcing platforms. The active job market for such tasks
reflects the fact that they can be seriously valuable to many entities
in the digital economy. But the reason why we consider them greymarket is because they can simultaneously destroy value for other
actors in the network.
Heroes of digital labor
How about born-digital work that represents an unambiguously
positive contribution to society? There are many kinds of it: from
helping to organize the ever-growing mountains of information into
more accessible forms through tagging and labeling, to providing
help and advice to the millions entering the new digital arenas where
we increasingly work and socialize. For example, the biggest expense
category in operating World of Warcraft, an online game with 11 million subscribers, is providing customer support to the players. There
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is now an entirely new global profession, known as Game Masters,
who specialize in helping people with stuck characters, missing
items and abusive co-players in virtual game worlds. This, if anything, is work born digital!
Studies of time-use indicate that the time spent with digital media
continues to grow even in countries where it is already high. As we
think about the possible future impact of increasing ICT adoption on
work and society in general, it makes sense to consider not only how
existing processes will change because of our engagement with digital
environments, but also what new phenomena will arise from it. Borndigital work and born-digital consumption, or virtual consumption,
are two such phenomena that have taken off on a massive scale.
Vili is a guest blogger at our blog. He is an economic sociologist
based at the University of Tokyo. Since 2004, Vili has been conducting pioneering research on virtual goods, currencies and economies
in collaboration with major online game publishers.
1. Current Analysis and Future Research Agenda on “Gold Farming”. The University of Manchester
bit.ly/2mqqM9
2. Does For the Win... Win? - Review - kotaku.com
bit.ly/bTyMVP
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July 2010 by Vili Lehdonvirta
Getting paid to party:
what is the difference
between work and play?
Work and play: as concepts, they couldn’t be further from each other
– right? Today, these two conceptual opposites are increasingly getting mixed up. Korean professional gamers make a living by competing in multiplayer games like StarCraft in front of television audiences of millions. Hundreds of thousands of virtual gold farmers in
China, Vietnam and elsewhere are paid an hourly wage to harvest
treasures in online games like EverQuest 2. And most recently, companies like CrowdFlower¹ have started to hire gamers and online
community members to carry out real chores like categorizing search
engine results and verifying links. The catch: these workers are paid
in virtual currency.²
No wonder some punters are starting to say that in the future, it
will no longer be possible to distinguish work from play. Rather than
repeat the same prediction, I would like to use this essay to put forward an even more radical idea: it never was possible to distinguish
work from play in the first place.
The meaning of work
The common sense way to distinguish between the two concepts is
that work is productive, whereas play or consumption is unproductive, even destructive, as it consumes value created through work. This
view was espoused by early economists such as Adam Smith and Karl
Marx, but modern economists consider it flawed. There is nothing
intrinsically valuable in toiling. Moving rocks from pile A to pile B will
be of no use unless someone desires those rocks to be moved. In fact,
misguided work can be not only unproductive, but simply destructive: think about excessive bureaucracy, spam advertising and drilling
holes in the sea floor that risk irreparable damage to our environment.
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Smith and others soon realized that economic value is actually produced or willed into being by consumers, whose demand for a good
or service gives work its meaning. This is called the subjective theory
of value, and it is how modern economists regard value. Inasmuch as
play produces enjoyable sensations that the player considers valuable,
it is a productive activity: something akin to working to satisfy one’s
own demand, and possibly also of others involved in the same game or
activity. Many people also enjoy volunteering for charities. As a result,
it is not possible to distinguish between work and play simply by saying that one is productive while the other is not.
Follow the money?
Surely we can still make the practical distinction that work is something
that someone will pay you money for? Not unless you are willing to
say that housework, subsistence farming and slave labor are not work,
but play. Unpaid work is often excluded from indicators such as GDP
because of the practical difficulty of tracking it, but this is recognized
as a shortcoming of the indicators. Work that is unpaid in one country
is often part of the money economy in another, so payment would be
a very arbitrary yardstick for work. Activities like casual gambling and
taking part in a game show can moreover be financially lucrative, even
though you would probably consider them play rather than work.
And so we reach the final attempt at distinguishing work from play.
Even though house chores and online games are both unpaid activities for me, from my perspective there is surely one big difference
between them: I’d much rather be playing Crown of Byzantus than
washing dishes. Indeed, this is how an economist would usually model
the relationship between work and play: play is something you prefer
over work. In order to get you to forgo some play in favor of work, an
employer must bribe you with something you prefer even more (up to
a certain degree): a salary, a flattering title, a possibility of bonuses, and
so on. Similarly, in order to be able to work less and play more, many
people are willing to pay someone else to do their cooking and cleaning.
Sounds intuitive? The problem with this definition is that it is
entirely subjective. If you love your design job and hate clubbing, this
definition says that your job is play and clubbing is work. While that is a
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cool way of looking at your job, it means that this definition, like all the
others, fails to give us any actual rule for distinguishing work from play.
Pass me the champagne, I’m working
The truth is that “work” and “play” are labels our culture attaches to
activities by tradition. Some things are labeled as work, some things
as play, and others as something completely different. The labels
carry with them certain meanings and moral values: for example,
things that are labeled as work tend to be considered useful, regardless of their actual contribution to society. As culture changes, so do
the labels: think about how the status of jazz musicians has changed
from dangerous subversives in the 1920s to high-brow entertainers
in the 2000s. Today, professional gaming is apparently starting to be
accepted as a legitimate career choice in Korea, while the World Bank
is commissioning a study on gold farmers. Scholars like me have
chosen to write about game economies, which for better or worse,
tends to have a legitimizing effect on the subject. It thus looks like the
cultural boundaries of work and play are on the move. If you are not
confused about work and play today, you probably will be tomorrow!
Let me finish with a scene from here in Tokyo illustrating that
it is not only the new born-digital jobs that challenge conventional
notions of work and play. Imagine yourself chatting with the ladies
at a cozy club in a Shinjuku nightlife district, whilst sipping champagne, cocktails, whisky and cognac – sound like a fun way of spending your leisure time? What if you got paid to do it? What if, instead of
paying for every drink, you actually got paid more the more alcohol
you consumed – would you still consider it play? Low on cash? No
problem, just grab that Moët and pour yourself another glass! This is
not a wannabe playboy’s dream, but a real dilemma for thousands of
Japanese guys. They work as hosts in so-called host clubs, drinking
establishments catering for wealthy (mostly) young women. I would
not recommend it as a job for anyone, as it is hard on the liver and
the head, but it is said to have its fun moments!
1. CrowdFlower - The World’s largest enterprise crowdsourcing platform
crowdflower.com
2. Joseph Galante - Virtual pay for real work - SFGate.com - bit.ly/bsSGzT
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October 2011 by Ville Miettinen
MOG: the day the
music gamified
Nowadays, the music business is like a country and western album
– there are no happy endings. Today’s young people have grown up
listening (legally and illegally) to free music. Most 16-year-olds seem
to think unlimited downloads are a basic human right. Sometimes it
seems like Apple shareholders are the only ones who make a decent
living from the industry anymore.
The recent Spotify-Facebook deal has pumped up the volume of
online debate. Since the “deep integration” of the two companies was
announced, Spotify has gained 1 million users and, simultaneously,
managed to enrage the entire blogosphere. As a Facebook user, I’ve
noticed a sudden avalanche of friends’ Spotify spam (guys I love you,
but if you’re listening to Enya, stay off my wall!).
While record companies are facing diminishing returns, the situation is not much better for the new generation of music companies:
Online, Spotify, Pandora, Grooveshark and Last.fm are all struggling
to make a honest buck. In such dark times, surely only a crazy person
would try launching another free music streaming service…
All you have to do is… Play the game
Executives at MOG clearly disagree. As hip/geeky readers will know,
MOG is not really new – the service first appeared in 2009. Until
recently however, listeners paid $5 per month to access MOG’s 11
million tracks. Now the service has turned freemium and is (currently) ad-free. So what’s the catch? In a word: gamification.
It works like this: you sign up to MOG and get a full free “tank”
of music. As you listen the tank empties. To refuel, you do tasks like
“making friend referrals, creating and sharing playlists and exploring MOG”. The more you engage/play with MOG, the more music you
get. MOG CEO David Hyman claims that the tank’s “sophisticated
game mechanics” should mean that users never have to pay for music.
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Master motivators
So, will people who won’t spend $5 per month on music be prepared
to spend time watching promos and sharing playlists? Well, maybe.
After all, millions of people already share music – this is just a way of
rewarding and encouraging them. I guess there is a danger that MOG
will mess with the motivation behind music sharing. Friends’ music
recommendations are supposed to be about genuine (if misguided)
love for a band, not about earning more MOG-points.
People’s outrage over the Spotify-Facebook deal is all about
lack of control: users feel they’re losing privacy and being forced to
share music. MOG is clearly just as desperate as Spotify to plug in
to Facebook’s 800 million users. However, MOG does give people
some “mastery” over how they share data and interact with advertisers (users actively decide which ads to watch, which tracks to share
etc). As gamers know, choice plus rewards can be a very powerful
combination indeed.
The official “love-in” between Spotify and Facebook may ultimately kill-off MOG. Longer-term though, the concept of gamifying
freemium music is a great idea. No doubt other services will soon be
developing their own “unique” game mechanics. Will it help save the
music industry? I guess that depends on how much the 16 year olds
want to play along.
1. Deep Spotify Integration Brings Free Music to Facebook - ReadWriteWeb
rww.to/pTP9cI
2. MOG - Unlimited Music. Listen for Free.
mog.com
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June 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Rookie or real player? The rise
of Seth Priebatsch
He’s 22, he wears a lot of orange and he wants to build a game layer
on top of the world. I’m talking, of course, about Seth Priebatsch.
Founder and “chief ninja” of location-based gaming service
SCVNGR,¹ Priebatsch is the media’s favorite gamification geek. Back
in March he gave a popular SXSW keynote speech² and since then
the blogs, articles and TV spots just keep on coming.
Journalists are clearly hypnotized. But does this “proud Princeton
dropout” really deserve quite so many column inches? Priebatsch
often claims that game mechanics can make people do anything. If
that’s true, skeptics might ask why SCVNGR is still only a moderately successful app. You do get the feeling that the pundits (and possibly Priebatsch himself) will only be satisfied with Mark Zuckerberg
levels of success. So is it all just hype or do Priebatsch’s projects live
up to his ambitions?
Big deals
Priebatsch’s first step towards building “the game layer” was SCVNGR.
Tagline: “Go places, do challenges. Earn points.” Think Foursquare
only super-gamified and with more free stuff. In return for completing challenges users (over 1 million of them so far) unlock “real world
rewards” provided by local, participating businesses.
Most 22-year-olds would be happy with one multi-million dollar
startup. But not Seth. Eighteen months after launching SCVNGR,
the blue-eyed boy from Boston announced his second venture:
LevelUp.³ LevelUp is part location-game, part daily deal site. The
theory goes like this: sites like Groupon are great at attracting lots
of customers; sites like Foursquare are great at keeping customers
engaged and loyal. Combine the two and you should get millions of
loyal, engaged (and profitable) users. Simple.
In practice, Levelup is a mobile app that offers users three different
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levels of localized deals: good, better and best. Each time you buy
one deal, you unlock (or level-up to) the next. To me, LevelUp feels a
bit like gaming-by-numbers, but according to Priebatsch the system
is “carefully crafted to create loyalty”. The game is currently up and
running in Boston and Philadelphia (next stop San Francisco). Good
news for East Coast residents in need of discount sushi/ tooth whitener/ rock-climbing lessons.
Over hyped and over here?
Even by Priebatsch’s standards, trying to break into the daily deals
sector is hugely ambitious. Established companies like Groupon and
LivingSocial are already worth billions. Plus Groupon is rumored to
be in talks about integrating with Foursquare. That could spell serious trouble for LevelUp. Say Priebatsch’s three deal system takes off
in a big way. What’s to stop a newly merged Foursquare-Groupon
hybrid going one better and offering a four deal version (like a tech
version of those old razor-blade ads)?
Like many “gamifiers” Seth Priebatsch still seems to be figuring
out exactly how to translate his grand vision⁴ into cold hard apps.
Right now, this fast-talking, hard-working entrepreneur comes
across as at little too focused on image as opposed to product.
Compared to the inspiring speeches, Priebatsch’s games are surprisingly unsubtle (LevelUp is basically a game where you get to do
one thing three times). But it’s easy to forget that this guy is only
22-years-old. Maybe, like the gamification sector as a whole, he just
needs to spend a little more time in development.
1. Scvngr - a game about doing challenges at places
scvngr.com
2. Set Priebatsch Games SXSW Interactive - SXSW.com
sxsw.com/node/6999
3. Level Up
thelevelup.com/
4. Seth Priebatsch - The game layer on top of the world - TED.com
bit.ly/cRkr3C
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May 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Down on MyFarm: gamification
goes rural
Picture the pioneers of gamification. Trend-leaders, people who are
prepared to really “get their hands dirty” promoting online engagement. Who do you see? A fast-talking baby-faced Princeton dropout? A well-groomed San Francisco game-developer? A good oldfashioned geek’s geek? Or how about a middle-aged English farmer?
Okay, the clue is in the title. Farmer Richard Morris is the proud
manager of 1200 acres of prime agricultural land, and the unlikely
overseer of real-life gaming venture: MyFarm.¹
Back to the land
In the US, FarmVille players now apparently outnumber real famers
60:1 (that’s one of those statistics that goes round the blogosphere so
fast it must be true). Encouraged by the sudden popularity of virtual
agriculture, the owners of the Wimpole Estate, Cambridgeshire, UK
have decided to let the web 2.0 generation have a go for real.
The idea behind MyFarm is simple: invite an online crowd of
10,000 users to run a real farm for a year. Organizers hope the
project will “reconnect people with where their food comes from.”
Members of the MyFarm community will discuss and vote on every
aspect of farming life: what to grow, what to breed, what to buy.
Whatever the crowd decides, as long as it’s legal, Farmer Morris
(who seems surprisingly relaxed about taking orders from a bunch
of online amateurs) will put it into practice.
To avoid disaster help things along, the MyFarm site is fully
equipped with web-cams, informative blogs and (of course) discussion forums. So far 1280 people have signed up to the site and are
hotly debating issues like wildlife management, crop rotation and
how many magic beans a rare-breed organic cow is worth. The first
official farming vote (Sow or No!) was scheduled for today, May 26th.
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Milking the trend?
Inevitably, the media has been quick to label MyFarm a real life
FarmVille. To me, the environmentalist/ educational/ do-gooder
ethos behind MyFarm actually has more in common with green gamification projects like Practically Green² and Recycle Bank.³
There are, however, a few key differences that make MyFarm
interesting. Practically Green, Recycle Bank and numerous other
projects all use game mechanics primarily to alter/improve individual user behavior. The focus is on rewarding “good” personal actions:
recycle more, drive less, run more. In contrast MyFarm is all about
users making collective decisions which have a direct impact on the
outside world (if only a small rural corner of the outside world).
From a strictly game-development point of view, MyFarm’s features are pretty rustic. No scoreboards, no clear narrative progression, no “juicy feedback”. The project also breaks one of the golden
rules of gamification: players should always progress and never completely fail. In MyFarm, total failure is a very real possibility. There
might be a drought, the soybeans might not sell, the site might get
hijacked by vegetarians who vote to set all the animals free.
So, is “playing” with the real world worth the risk? Can plain reality actually be fun? Farmer Morris and his crowd seem to think so.
Time, as always, will be the best judge of their success.
1. My Farm
my-farm.org.uk
2. Practically Green
practicallygreen.com
3. Recyclebank - More than 3 million members are making an impact
recyclebank.com
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November 2010 by Ville Miettinen
Science fun: the protein shake
that makes you a genius
For the past few nights, my life has contained far more protein than
normal. I’m not talking about the variety best cooked medium-rare
on a barbecue, but the brain-food found in the science-meets-crowdsourcing game Foldit.
You got to know when to hold it;
know when to foldit
Foldit is a free, online protein-folding game. Players tweak, shake
and wiggle chains of amino acids into stable 3D shapes (think biochemical origami).
The usefulness of proteins is explained in detail on the Foldit site.
Suffice it to say, if we want to cure Alzheimer’s, AIDS or even just
allergies, we’re definitely going to need them.
For years computers have struggled with the pattern recognition and problem solving ability needed to fold proteins. Foldit’s
creators found that people – even those with no scientific background – excelled at these skills. In a study published in Nature,¹
human players were pitted against the latest modeling software,
called Rosetta. Out of ten puzzles the humans won five, drew three
and lost two.
The game has been widely reported as a “man beats machine”
story, but the real genius of Foldit is that it allows man and machine
to work together. Once Rosetta has created the initial shape of a protein, people take over – using their superior strategy and risk-taking
ability to find the optimum “fold”.
World of Foldit
Other crowdsourced science projects exist, such as Galaxy Zoo,²
which has over 60 million contributions. What makes Foldit stand
out (as if the chance to fold protein molecules wasn’t thrilling enough
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on its own) is that it is effectively a massively multiplayer online science game.
Now, I’d be the first to admit Foldit is no World of Warcraft. But
although the interface and gameplay are pretty basic, Foldit does use
the power of game mechanics to keep you hooked. There are tutorials, points, rewards and levels – all of which give a sense of progression and increasing status. It’s easy to imagine a future version
where you play with your own, lab-coat wearing Avatar (who’d no
doubt start off as a humble, virtual teacher’s aid and work up to a
tenured professor).
There’s also an active and growing community of some 60,000
Foldit players. Teams and soloists compete for top rankings, chat
on forums, write wikis and can enter contests with cash prizes. This
“metagame” activity creates a great buzz around the game, as well
as motivating players and encouraging competition and innovation.
What’s in a game?
Over and over again people have shown they are prepared to invest
huge amounts of time, energy and skill into playing online games. A
commitment level many employers would envy. In their book Total
Engagement Byron Reeves and Leighton Read envisage a future
workforce demanding the same level of satisfaction from their job as
they get playing games.
Foldit, while perhaps a little primitive, uses a game to harness the
power of the crowd in aid of science. A first step perhaps in a much
wider trend (one that online, crowdsourced work is ideally placed
to exploit) that could ultimately blur the distinction between work
and play.
1. Predicting protein structures with a multiplayer online game - nature.com
bit.ly/clk7Eu
2. Galaxy Zoo, where you can helpo astronomers explore the universe
galaxyzoo.org
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October 2010 by Ville Miettinen
Teaching kids to win
A friend of mine once taught at a school in London’s East End. It
was what a recruitment consultant might describe as a “challenging” teaching environment. The role was less Robin Williams in
Dead Poet’s Society, more Michelle Pfeiffer in Dangerous Minds.
Kids weren’t climbing on their desks so they could chant “O Captain,
my captain”, they were just finding a better angle for throwing their
chair at the blackboard.
Throwing away the text book
The most disruptive students – let’s take Darren as an example –
made teaching almost impossible. My friend’s solution: let them
send texts and play games on their phones. Despite this being against
school rules, it made his job easier, and there was less disruption
for those that actually wanted to learn. It was the most beneficial
solution for all concerned, although big things weren’t expected of
Darren come exam time.
Anyone that’s been to school can sympathize to some extent with
Darren. For every inspiring Dead Poet’s Society moment, there are
countless instances of dead boring subject matter and dull repetition. Sounds familiar huh? Almost like having a dull job. With that
in mind, it’s not much of a leap to think that theories on what makes
a satisfied worker will have some relevance in the classroom.
This reminds me of Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s concept of “Flow”.
Flow is an optimal state of activity where one is totally immersed
in the performance of a task. Such a state is common when people
strive to achieve a clear, challenging goal that requires the exercise
of their skills and abilities. Also important is direct feedback and a
sense of personal control. The activity itself can be anything from a
microtask to a long, complex game.
If you’ve ever been involved in a competitive game, you probably have experienced the sensation. This is because games generally contain the key elements required to achieve the state of flow.
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As discussed in the earlier post, if you could make work more like a
game, you would have more success engaging your workforce. Or, if
the methods of Lee Sheldon¹ are anything to go by, your classroom.
Class war
Sheldon teaches courses in game design. When teaching his students
difficult concepts, he uses the terminology, structure and reward systems of the World of Warcraft MMOG to motivate and grade them.
The results include increased class participation and motivation.
It’s easy to dismiss this approach as only working because the
students – wannabe game designers – are likely to be highly familiar with the quest-based teaching plan. Replicate it in a class full of
Darrens and the results probably wouldn’t be as positive. But the
idea of improving participation through employing a relevant gamebased structure has been shown to be effective in other cases too.
A game called Re-Mission has improved the way adolescents
and young adults manage their cancer treatment. The game itself
saw users control a character called Roxxi, battling cancer cells in
a highly accurate depiction of a human body. Those that played the
game showed greater adherence to the strict drug-taking regimens,
and retained chemotherapy drugs in their bodies for longer periods than the control group. The games creators HopeLab assert the
game works because it gives the players “a sense of power and control over their cancer”.
That final quote includes what Mihály Csíkszentmihályi cites
as two crucial elements of achieving flow. Now, if only my teaching friend could think of a game structure relevant to his students,
bigger things might be expected of Darren come exam time. Maybe
a quest that involved throwing chairs at the blackboard could get
things flowing.
1. Prof Subs Grades for Experience Points, Presentations with Quests Switched.com
aol.it/dzrX4p
2. HopeLab
hopelab.org
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April 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Lost in the Virtual Economy?
Here’s a map
Every day we hear more about goldfarming, crowdsourcing, distributed work and other areas of the so-called “virtual economy”.
As with any industry in its infancy, exactly what is meant by
these terms is unclear, and rapidly evolving. (If you find it slightly
confusing, don’t worry: it probably just shows you have been paying
attention.)
This is why we are so excited about the new study Knowledge
Map of the Virtual Economy¹ by Vili Lehdonvirta (researcher at the
University of Tokyo and occasional guest writer on the Microtask
blog) and his colleague Mirko Ernkvist.
Along with giving us something to blog about, the aim of the
study is to provide an updated picture of the scale and development
of the virtual economy. It focuses on its economic impact, business
models and value chains. The two major areas of the virtual economy
identified in the report are third party gaming services and, more
interesting for us, the role of microwork in virtual worlds.
The bottleneck: translating
problems into microtasks
The report explains that, although microwork itself requires no
technological expertise, converting computational and business
problems into microtasks requires a great deal. This is well known
to our tech-experts: Digitalkoot, the first Microtask-powered service, combines advanced OCR techniques, human recognition skills
and game mechanics to seamlessly distribute work to end users.
What we are really proud of is that the crowd does the work by playing games. (Let’s call it “gamesourcing”, just to confuse everyone
even more.)
Thankfully, the report also considers what some of these new
terms actually mean. Usually the word “crowdsourcing” is used
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interchangeably with “microwork”. According to Lehdonvirta and
Ernkvist, they are in fact distinct: Crowdsourcing entails outsourcing tasks traditionally performed by employees or contractors to
a large group of people through the internet. Microwork on the
other hand tends to involve breaking the work down to suitably
sized microtasks, integrating quality assurance into the process,
and recombining the completed microtasks into a final deliverable. This is a view that we certainly share, and a good reminder of
how powerful words are: expect more Microtask’s tweets with the
“microwork” hashtag from now on.
Back to the future: appetite for disruption
The report goes on to argue that “Microwork is today emerging as
a separate concept from crowdsourcing, rather than a subset of it
[...] The innovation in microwork is the transformation of information work into microsized units, similarly to how Taylorism
and scientific management transformed manufacturing work in
the late 19th century.”
Although it may be tempting to question whether this is a step
forward or a step back, it is important to consider the new opportunities. Tasks that are not economically feasible using traditional
work practices will soon (if not already) be possible using microwork. Imagine a long-time professional photographer wanting to sell
his pictures online. He would have to tag thousands of shots, consuming weeks if not months of his precious time. Soon he will be able
to submit his pictures to a microwork service and let the crowd work
its magic, shrinking weeks and months into mere hours.
The report goes on to discuss some of the key problems the industry must overcome. These include payment channels (especially
when using workforce from other countries) and legislation relating to worker protection (are microworkers employees or independent contractors? How to ensure there is no child labor involved?).
Despite these issues, the report considers the potential of the mechanism self-evident.
A final message to take from the report is a call to action: if the
upgrading strategies mentioned in the study (coordination of workers,
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and building capacities to supply and grow microwork in developing countries) are tackled quickly, it suggests that the whole market
could be worth several billion dollars within the next five years, as the
technology matures. Not bad for tasks that you can complete in just a
couple of seconds (whatever they end up being called).
1. Vili Lehdonvirta - Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy - infodev.org
bit.ly/esE3EI
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Daboratorio
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February 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
Digitalkoot: crowdsourcing
Finnish Cultural Heritage
Many years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, specialization and
Justin Bieber changed human existence forever, jobs requiring many
hands brought communities together.
In Finland, building a house was once such a job. The collective
effort was called a talkoot (in English the closest translation we have
is “working-bee” or “barn-raising”).
Even if you are not Amish, I’m sure you have experienced something
like it when moving to a new apartment. Your friends come over, you
tell them about your serious back pain, they lift your washing machine
and grand piano down the winding stairs. At the end of the day, when
your back doesn’t seem to hurt too much anymore, you offer them cold
pizza and the solemn vow to be there for them when they next move.
2011: the year Finnish culture went electric
With all this in mind, we are proud to introduce Digitalkoot: the first
public Microtask-powered service. We are running it in collaboration with the National Library of Finland.¹
The library is currently scanning and indexing its enormous archi­
ves, in order to make them searchable over the Internet and easily
accessible for everyone. So far so good. The problem is that the optical character recognition software (OCR) used to input the text occasionally makes mistakes. These mistakes significantly affect the ability to search and use the archives, so must be corrected. This might
seem simple enough, until you consider that the mistakes must be
corrected by humans, and the National Library has four million pages
of archives.
This is where Microtask comes in. Instead of spending millions of
euros and many years trying to correct these mistakes using library
employees, the idea is to use a voluntary crowdsourced workforce.
Now the great part: rather than asking the crowd to spend time
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tediously reading through text that may not interest them, all they
need to do is play social computer games.
For those of you have been paying attention to our blog over the
last few months, you will recall us talking about using gaming mechanisms to make repetitive tasks more fun (these posts are reprinted
in the Gamification section of this book). Today we are proud to say
that the talking is over (well, not over, but we have some action for
you). Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, today we bring you Mole
Bridge and Mole Hunt, two brand new games with the vintage flavor
of gaming classics such as Lemmings and Whac-A-Mole.
Your country needs YOU
Behind the games is a simple recognition mechanism: the player
is shown the original image of a word that the OCR software has
had a problem with. The volunteer then has a few seconds to either
type the word in or check its accuracy. Starting with system-wide
score leaderboards (making Facebook challenges available soonish),
Digitalkoot’s goal is to get players and their networks hooked to the
cause of culture digitalization.
Harri Holopainen, Microtask’s Managing Director, is excited
about the scope and implications of the project:
“The Internet will change the way people work. Instead of going
to work, work will come to you. We decided to start with something
simple, yet meaningful: type a few words to digitize your culture
for later generations.”
With its enormous archives, the National Library of Finland can
promise volunteers millions of good excuses to play computer games
while at work. Could anyone seriously complain when what you are
really doing is saving a country’s cultural heritage?
We will start with 19th century copies of the newspaper Aamulehti
(The Morning Paper) and proceed towards the complete digitalization of the Finnish cultural heritage.
Start saving moles (and Finnish culture) on the Digitalkoot site
today!
1. The National Library of Finland - nationallibrary.fi
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June 2011 by Tommaso De Benetti
The secrets of Digitalkoot:
Lessons learned
crowdsourcing data entry
to 50,000 people (for free)
As many of you will know, a few months ago Microtask and the
National Library of Finland launched a project called Digitalkoot.
Being the first Microtask-powered public service, Digitalkoot was a
huge test for our crowdsourcing platform, the use of volunteers to
complete microtasks, our ideas about gamification and rewards, and
basically us as decent, upstanding citizens.
As we have already mentioned, with over 50,000 volunteers so
far, the project has been a great success (which is nice for us, because
it means we can start sleeping at night again). We have learned so
much from this experience that we decided to share it with you, the
crowd that made it all possible.
Making work play: Move over Super Mario,
hello Super a-Mole-d
For those of you who have not understood a word I have so far said,
the aim of Digitalkoot is to accurately digitize the National Library’s
enormous archives, making them searchable over the internet. It
uses crowdsourced volunteers to input data that Optical Character
Recognition (OCR) software struggles with (for example documents
that are handwritten or printed in old fonts, such as very old copies
of the newspaper Aamulehti).
Digitalkoot relies on machines, humans and a gaming twist to
make it all fun. This is how it works in practice: old text newspaper is scanned by OCR software and then cut up into individual
words. These words are sent to volunteers in the form of two online
games we created (Mole Hunt and Mole Bridge). Volunteers must
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accurately decipher the words in order to achieve certain game
objectives, such as helping the moles cross a bridge or keeping them
away from a garden.
What for volunteers was an amusing game, for the National
Library was an affordable way to digitize, bit by bit, the entire collection of Aamulehti. The game was popular with volunteers as well
as the press: The New York Times,¹ Wired² and a variety of other
media all said nice things about our heroic, text-loving moles.
Engineering success: Golden tasks
and diligent pests
The challenges Microtask’s engineers had to overcome were daunting (we will present a paper on Digitalkoot at HCOMP 2011). One
problem, for example, was how to deal with malicious players who
deliberately type in the wrong words (one tireless volunteer spent
over an hour and a half doing just this. We like to think he/she is
either a very bad typist or has a passionate hatred for moles…either
that or someone let their dog volunteer).
To identify such volunteers, the system begins the game feeding the player only “golden tasks”, which we know the answer to.
Once the player demonstrates that they are actually trying to play
properly, the ratio of these verification tasks gradually lowers. This
process is completely invisible, so even if spammers understand the
mechanism, they will not be able to cheat it.
Other challenges included thorny mechanical issues like deciding the type of gameplay to implement (the first prototypes required
input methods other than typing which proved to be very inefficient),
issues with the number of parallel players to crosscheck answers, and
scalability of the system. There were also more mundane issues, for
example some people were unwilling to use their Facebook account
to connect with the games (a very vocal minority requested login by
email, so we introduced it a couple of weeks after the launch).
Holy moley: some staggering statistics
Figures for Digitalkoot are as impressive as they are interesting. The
amount of gameplay for each person varied enormously, from a few
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seconds to more than 100 hours. The average was a more down-toearth 9 minutes and 18 seconds. Men have proved more eager to
join the cause and better at topping the charts (the top four players
are men), while women completed on average almost twice as much
tasks than men.
At the time of writing 55,000 people (and perhaps one dog) have
taken part in the experiment. This in a country of only 5 million
(people). Together they have contributed 3,400 hours of their time
on a voluntary basis, and achieved a staggering 99% of accuracy in
the transcription of the Aamulehti archive.
Tasks for the future
Although the project has run extremely well, there is a lot we can
improve on. Next time around, for example, we would like to: minimize redundancy while checking the accuracy of tasks; be able to distinguish between words belonging to a title or to the text body; add
soft keys for keyboards without the letters “å, ö, ä”; add new types
of microtasks (typing is not the only thing we can do, of course);
improve gameplay mechanics and reward mechanisms working side
by side with professionals (or figure out in which contexts the game
interface undermines efficiency instead of increasing it).
One thing that is apparent from the long list above, is that we here
at Microtask will not be running out of tasks any time soon.
1. Mikko Torikka - Crowdsourcing Startup Microtask Gets Gamers to Do Some
Real Work - The New York Times
nyti.ms/gFpzRo
2. Bruce Sterling - Digitalkoot, a game-ified social Finnish cultural endeavor wired.com
bit.ly/eMY4gn
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March 2010 by Tommaso De Benetti
Are the Golden Years history?
There is a garden in the countryside not far from Venice, where it is
said the finest tomatoes in the world are found. The rumor goes that
the pasta sauce made from these tomatoes is so good, that once you
have tasted it your taste buds will never recover.
These are clearly very bold and totally subjective claims, and even
though the only person who actually ever makes them is my father –
who also happens to grow the tomatoes – I personally tend to agree
(partly because he says it so often).
Living the dream
Since retiring with a pension in 2008, my father has had a considerable amount of time to devote to his garden. When he is not gardening
or reading a lifetime of accumulated books, he spends his time taking long ambling walks in the countryside with my mother and his
friends. While nothing is ever perfect, I think it is fair to say that my
father is living the kind of retirement that most of us dream about.
My parents were both teachers, my father the class of 1950 and
my mother a few years later. Unlike my father, my mother is still
teaching. As much as she likes elementary school children, she’s progressively growing tired of the job itself.
Moving the finish line
Up until a few months ago, my mother was almost eligible to retire
with a pension, just like my father did. But just as she was nearing
the finish line, the retirement age for women was raised to the same
age it is for men. It might seem a totally obvious measure, but it has
caused uproar throughout the country. Behind the justifiable claim
that it is bringing gender equality, this measure is in practice forcing
millions of women – mostly public employees – to stay at work for
years longer than they expected because the state cannot afford the
cost of their pensions.
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Age concern
An aging population is a problem that governments all over the world
are faced with. In 1935, when the United States first introduced the
pension, the life expectancy was 67 years. When Social Security was
implemented, there were 16 workers for every Social Security recipient; today there are 3.3 workers, and it is estimated that by 2030
there will be only two.
And this is just the beginning: According to Cambridge researcher
Aubrey de Gray, with surprisingly few scientific breakthroughs people already alive may even live to be 1,000 years old.¹ (De Gray himself, with his Moses-like five foot beard, lends considerable credit
to his controversial ideas). The result would be a world (possibly
resembling Florida) full of retirees, with no one to support them.
When it comes to an aging population, Italy is an even worse position than the US and most other countries. After Japan, it is the “oldest”
country in the world. Even today the country is struggling to balance its
books. Because of a declining birth-rate, in the near future – regardless of whether life expectancy sky-rockets – a declining number of tax
payers will be increasingly unable to support the numbers of retirees
drawing a pension, at least not without enduring an enormous tax hike.
With people living a much longer and having fewer children, the
most obvious and effective solution to this problem is to increase the
age of retirement. The more you work, the less time you have left to
spend money without producing economic value in exchange. For
those who have worked hard all their lives, knowing that when they
reach a certain age they can retire, it’s a brutal solution – especially
when the changes are made abruptly.
Tech rescue?
Technical achievements and digital marketplaces, though, could
soon offer a solution to ease the transition between working 10
hours per day and spending all your time in the garden perfecting
tomatoes. Let’s take my mother as an example. She understands her
job well, and is very good at it. After many years of experience, the
majority of her responsibilities (such as the production of support
material for the children) are a breeze.
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But even so, at her age, physical exhaustion caused by standing long
hours, chasing up administrative issues, and even talking with parents
(who for her now often seem like they are from another planet) is a
problem. Based on such difficulties, I wonder if she would be happier – and perhaps even more useful – working these last five years of
service from behind the scenes.
With the support of the right platform and some very basic training she could easily grade compositions, review registers and help
improve teaching material. And this kind of support could be useful not just for her colleagues at the local school, but for teachers in
schools spread all over the country.
Until now, finding a happy medium has been difficult. Even if you can
reduce hours or responsibilities, often in practice this means working
the same job but for less pay. It’s early days yet, but increasing connectivity and the development of ideas based on it – including crowdsourcing
– look set to change the way we think about work and retirement.
Use it or lose it
And the benefits of such a transition extend far beyond simple economics. While my father is happy growing the world’s best tomatoes
and wandering the hills bragging about them, many retirees struggle for a sense of relevance in a world that no longer seems to need
them. Statistically, people who retire younger tend to die younger too.
Although many factors are at play here (unwell people are more likely
to retire), multiple studies show that both mental and physical condition deteriorates when not challenged and when one ceases to have a
clear purpose² for living.
For governments all over the world, finding a way to keep their citizens productive for longer is not just desirable, but essential. Because
necessity is still the mother of invention, I suspect that such solutions
will be found faster than is expected. While a change in mindset is also
required, I believe it is such changes that will keep the golden years
from slipping into the red.
1. Aubrey de Grey - We can avoid aging - TED.com - bit.ly/GeVEb
2. Dan Buettner - How to live to be 100+ - TED.com - bit.ly/6Fbx07
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May 2010 by Katri Saarikivi
Work could heal the mind:
microtasking from
a cognitive perspective
Recent studies of cognitive disorders have found that basic cognitive exercises can help to restore the level of cognitive processing.
In this article guest writer Katri Saarikivi discusses how task based
work, and in particular microtasks, offer exciting opportunities for
not only the treatment of cognitive dysfunction, but also reducing
lost productivity in the workplace.
Cognitive difficulties in different illnesses
Cognitive difficulties can arise in conjunction with many kinds of illness and stressors. Obvious states such as burnout, brain injury or
dementia and less obvious such as schizophrenia, depression or even
gambling addiction are associated with difficulties in cognitive functioning. The difficulties come about especially through disruption of
neurocognitive functions such as working memory, executive function and attention. These are very basic functions of the mind that
make it possible for people to act purposefully and smoothly in their
environment, pursue goals and balance between personal needs and
the needs of others. They can be viewed as the precursors to intelligent action, the basic functions needed to operate in the world and
employ one’s intelligence and knowledge.
The neural mechanisms behind cognitive functions are still being
discovered. A lot is however known about how difficulties in cognitive functioning affect day-to-day life and human thought processes.
Cognitive difficulties associated with depression, a very common
condition, can last longer than the disruption of mood. The cognitive aspect of the illness makes working and returning to normal
life after sick leave difficult, even though mood is normalized. In
the case of schizophrenia, a study¹ showed that most patients feel
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that neurocognitive symptoms affect their quality of life to a greater
extent than psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations. This seems
incredible, but if you imagine what it would be like if you couldn’t
concentrate, carry out actions in a logical way or even plan them, it
becomes easier to comprehend the devastating effects that neurocognitive difficulties can have on people’s lives.
Measurement of cognitive function and
therapeutic methodology
Neurocognitive functioning has been routinely measured in clinical psychological assessments for a long time and there is abundant information about the normal level of functioning and wellresearched methods to spot specific difficulties. Curing cognitive
difficulties is however a newer area of interest and research. There
is, for instance, no medical treatment. Many drugs that are used –
for example in treatment of schizophrenia – can slow down cognitive deterioration but definitive results for remediation are yet to
be seen. However, encouraging results about truly restoring cognitive function have been obtained with different kinds of cognitive
remediation. One method of remediation called CRT (for cognitive
remediation therapy), consists of interactive sessions concentrating
on exercises that require the use of working memory, executive function and attention. The effect of the therapy² is based on training
the neurocognitive functions that have deteriorated because of the
mental illness. Cognitive remediation therapies can also include a
metacognitive aspect through verbalizing and becoming aware of
thought processes involved in completing the exercises.
Work can support wellbeing
In addition to its specific therapeutic benefits, cognitive remediation therapy provides the mind with stimulation and purpose. The
mind needs purposeful action to heal itself, passivity does not help
and can even hinder recovery. In depression, it has been noticed
that treatment with long sick leaves actually counteracts recovery.
The explaining factor could be that on sick leave, all the stimulating
structures of work become unavailable, leaving the mind passive.
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Although there is a link between work overload, burnout and
depression, work has the potential to be experienced as meaningful
and a source of long-lasting wellbeing. As work is such an important determinant of peoples’ lives, it seems unfruitful to exclude it at
times when it could provide support for wellbeing. When aiming to
make use of the wellbeing-support that work could offer in depression, the important things to consider are the cognitive requirements and characteristics as well as the amount of work. Depression
causes oversensitivity to overload and susceptibility to fatigue which
makes determining the cognitive aspects of work and tailoring the
work load of people recovering from depression critical.
Microtasks, basic cognitive functions and therapy
When considering the cognitive aspects of work, the task-based
approach offers a multitude of possibilities and ideas. Knowledge
intensive work cannot be viewed through positions, work places,
hours or roles. What is more important is specific task content and
finding effective ways to split work into tasks. Microtasks are small
human intelligence tasks (HITs) that require only basic cognitive
function, much like the neurocognitive functions explained above.
Thinking about work through task content and even on the level of
microtasks or HITs, the cognitive characteristics of work can be perceived in detail. When the cognitive details of work are known, it
enables matching the specific cognitive needs of the employee to the
content of work.
The exercises used in cognitive remediation therapy are quite
simple as they require using basic neurocognitive functions of the
mind. As microtasks also require only basic cognitive functions, an
intriguing overlap becomes evident. What if people could work and
support the recovery of cognitive function at the same time? Defining
work through task content opens up possibilities for altering work
according to the cognitive situation of the worker. Following this
line of thought, microtasks could be used to identify and even heal
specific cognitive difficulties through careful definition and constellation according to psychological concepts of neurocognition and
remediation.
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Organizations which define work through task content could harness the remedial qualities of microtasks, with the result that people
would not have to leave work for months in case of sickness that
affects cognition. Instead, work content could be altered according
to therapeutic principles that respond to the specific remedial needs
of the employee. This would mean that the employer would not lose
valuable human resources and that the employee could benefit from
the various ways that working can support wellbeing.
As our knowledge of cognitive function and the cognitive aspects
of work increases, wonderful opportunities to redefine working in
a way that increases wellbeing become apparent. Providing additional mental health services is one way to approach the problem,
but as pressure for a solution increases, something with a more
comprehensive effect has to emerge. Molding the structures that
people function in and with daily, like organizations and work contents, offers a powerful tool to influence structures of the mind and
to reach many people at once. Using work as therapy is not a new
idea but with the knowledge we have nowadays, the level of detail
and the size of the effect can be amazing. The possibilities are vast
and apparent. What is needed next are brave steps towards the taskbased paradigm from companies and brave steps towards work life
from therapeutic methodology.
1. Is quality of life associated with cognitive impairment in schizophrenia?
- sciencedirect.com
bit.ly/H6ooGS
2. Are the effects of cognitive remedation therapy (CRT) durable? - PubMed.gov
1.usa.gov/GOEQuI
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May 2010 by Esko Kilpi
Task-work in
global networks
Resource allocation has always been one of the main tasks of management: planning what is to be done by whom and when? In integrated factory-systems and with homogenous resources, allocation
could easily be done top-down and in advance of doing anything.
Planning could take place separated from the action.
When human intelligence is the decisive factor of production and
when work takes place most economically in de-centralized environments, this top down process is increasingly inefficient. A manager
simply cannot know who knows best, or where the best contributions could come from.
The solution has been so far to try to know what we know, and
even more importantly to try to know who knows. Neither of these
approaches has quite fulfilled expectations. Knowledge management databases have not met the situational needs of managers.
Accordingly, knowledge workers have not been able to explain to
others in a meaningful way what they know.
Because of the aforementioned needs in daily life a new, different
approach has been adopted in leading global corporations. You could
even claim that a new mode of knowledge production is emerging in
digitally networked firms. This approach is called task-work. Taskwork as a method refers to a new economic phenomenon: people from
all over the network contribute small pieces of their time and expertise, voluntarily, to common projects modularized as tasks. Knowledge
workers do this based on their availability, interest and experience.
People choose themselves what they do, they choose the tasks they take
up and the possible colleagues they temporarily want to work with.
Task-work has systemic advantages over traditional production
hierarchies when the product under development is mainly immaterial in nature and the involved capital investment can be distributed
in the network.
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Collaboratively crafted content bases like the world’s largest
encyclopedia, Wikipedia, were early examples of task-work.
We will see organizational applications emerge as technological
innovations like the Microtask platform spread. For most kinds of
information products, task-work is the most efficient method of creating value from a resource allocation point of view. The system of
task-work develops as much bottom-up as top-down. In a top-down
system the worker’s role is created and provided by the organization
for the worker. The user has none or very little control over what
tasks are available for him.
In the bottom-up system the user creates her role in an openended life stream based on her unique history and her unique intentions for the future. The knowledge worker selects the tasks best
suited for her capabilities and best supporting her learning and longterm development.
Task work follows the vision of small pieces loosely joined. Task
work is thus at the core of modern theory of the WEB and networked,
interactive value creation. Work of the future is not role based but
task-based.
Esko is on the advisory board of Microtask. He also writes his
own blog¹ about interactive value creation.
3. Esko Kilpi on Interactive Value Creation
eskokilpi.blogging.fi/
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February 2012 by Ville Miettinen
Happily ever after:
how bored workers and
their bosses can benefit
from crowdsourcing
With its mysterious, often invisible army of workers diligently completing tasks and solving problems, it is understandable that the
media sometimes treat crowdsourcing almost like a fairytale industry.
Recently, however, our friends at CrowdControl¹ have begun to
tear down our carefully cultivated air of magic and mystery with new
research on the demographics of digital labor² (I can handle losing a little mystique, but nobody better go anywhere near my special
Microtask wizard’s hat). Some of the results do not make pleasant
reading for traditional employers.
The research found that nearly 75% of those surveyed have a job
outside of their Turk work and 21% perform tasks while at another
job. Although this is a great way for workers to boost their pay packets while passing a boring afternoon, it is unlikely to be viewed
enthusiastically by their employers. This trend will surely increase:
the crowdsourcing industry is growing rapidly and nearly half of surveyed workers are between 26 and 35, with their whole working life
ahead of them.
We, of course, do not see this as a major problem (assuming staff
at Microtask are not doing it). But we are concerned about the reputation of our industry, and how distributed labor is perceived by the
wider market. So what can companies do?
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Unhappy endings from the past
One option is to try to cut off employees’ access to crowdsourcing
platforms. This would, of course, be largely futile: with a smartphone
and a 3G connection, workers can easily bypass the company connection (plus the thrill of doing something illicit may be an extra
incentive to beat the system).
History suggests that trying to block access may be worse than
futile. Back in the first days of Napster and the birth of illegal P2P
file sharing, the music industry faced a similar dilemma, as its traditional revenue streams were threatened by technological progress.
As we all know, the efforts of big record companies to resist progress
were far from successful.
Let’s make a deal
A better idea would be to learn something from digital labor and
judge employees by their results, not by the hours they spend at their
desks staring into the void. Like those enlightened companies that
have successfully implemented unlimited leave opportunities for
staff,³ employers may find that if staff are treated like responsible
adults, they just may just act like them, and get the job done even if
they spend occasional down-time completing distributed tasks (or
just playing Minesweeper).
Employers could even go a step further – like some of our customers are – and keep staff occupied all day by filling their down-time
with distributed tasks. If employees are not thrilled by this prospect,
they could be incentivized by additional pay for tasks completed.
These tasks could be related to the company’s own in-house digital
labor needs, or a third party’s.
The CrowdControl survey results may be fascinating, but they are
not yet definitive, and any interpretation relies on a degree of speculation. However, as more research into digital labor is released, we
are building a clearer picture of the dynamic, motivated workforce
using new digital labor opportunities to achieve their goals outside
traditional structures.
The big question is whether those traditional structures are flexible enough to cope with the changes that digital labor will bring.
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One thing’s for sure – as any music industry bigwig will tell you –
it’s never a good idea to stand in the way of progress. If traditional
employers want a happy ending, they should make sure they learn
from the past.
1. Crowd Control - The Human Powered Computer
crowdcontrolsoftware.com
2. Survey Helps Us Get to Know Amazon’s Mechanical Turks - crowdsourcing.org
bit.ly/t1FzsA
3. Bruce Watson - Life’s a Beach: Seattle Company Offers Unlimited Paid Vacation
aol.it/GQsjtI
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October 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Crime-sourcing: the dark side
of the crowd
What do you do if your bank account gets hacked? Option 1: cancel
your credit cards, have a couple of drinks and promise to stop opening emails from long lost cousins based in Nigeria. Option 2: take it
personally, put on some dark sunglasses and go after the hackers.
Misha Glenny chose option 2, and then spent over two years infiltrating the murky world of cyber-crime. He uncovered a fast-growing, global industry. According to Glenny, cyber-crime bosses are
adaptable, imaginative and eager to exploit new technology. They’re
also phenomenal outsourcers – a single hack can involve a “distributed workforce” operating across continents. So maybe it’s not surprising that – just like many legit online businesses – the bad guys
are now experimenting with a new online tool: the crowd.
Guilty pleasures
So, how do you convince the crowd to commit crime? Answer: trick
them into it. Take this ingenious scam¹ where users (presumably
young, spotty males) were given access to free pornography in return
for solving CAPTCHAs. The more words they decoded, the more
images appeared. Unfortunately, it turned out the CAPTCHA data
was being used to break into Yahoo email accounts. You kind of have
to admire the criminals’ grasp of game motivation theory, if not their
choice of “reward”.
The sheer range of crime-sourcing plots is jaw-dropping: from
Twitter organized flash robs² to shady Mafia-type gangs who rec­ruit
virtual mules³ to launder money and receive stolen goods. Then
there are cyber-crimes where the crowd actively participates, like
the notorious LulzSec⁴ group’s “hacking hotline” which got people
to vote on who the group’s next hacking victim should be (must have
caused Sarah Palin some serious DDoS problems).
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Trust me, I’m a crowdsourcer
Does crime-sourcing matter much to us – the hard-working, honest crowdsourcing majority? I guess it depends how big the “crimesourcing sector” grows. Could enough crowd-scams make people
suspicious of crowdsourcing in general? Right now there’s a lot of
“positive-energy” around crowdsourcing. If we lose this, we risk losing the crowd altogether. Imagine people thinking: “those digital
moles sure look cute, but what if they’re really a furry front for some
evil cyber villain?” Or if crime-sourced games started infiltrating
social networks (gives Mafia Wars a whole new meaning).
Of course, this is all speculation – a worst case scenario. Crimesourcing is really a twisted tribute to the power of crowds. It’s only
because crowdsourcing has become so successful that criminals are
suddenly desperate to get “in on the game”. We just have to work out
how to stop them. Ideas anyone?
1. PC stripper helps spam to spread - BBC News
bbc.in/H1Vvw4
2. From ‘flash mob’ to ‘flash rob’ - France24.com
f24.my/pFZYpM
3. Data Breach Highlights Role Of ‘Money Mules’ - The Washington Post
wapo.st/17OX5H
4. LulzSec opens hack request line - BBC News
bbc.in/l0K3iG
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October 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Google Ngrams:
in the beginning
was the word search
Long, long ago, before Android, G+ and self-driving cars, Google had
one simple mission: to organize the world’s information and make
it universally accessible and easy to use.
Nowadays, the big-friendly-search-giant sometimes seems more
interested in irritating Mark Zuckerberg than promoting universal
knowledge. But, just occasionally, Google gets back to basics.
In 2004 Google started digitizing books. Since then, 15 million volumes have been digitized by OCR software into Google’s
virtual library. Recently, Harvard scholars Erez Lieberman Aiden
and Jean-Baptiste Michel decided to try and turn this literary datamountain into something “useful and accessible”. The result is
Google Ngram viewer:¹ a tool that searches and graphs the frequency of words contained in over 5 million books. Basically you
type in a word and get back a pretty-yet-educational chart of say
religion vs science or drinking habits through the ages. As Aiden
and Michel enthusiastically demonstrated² in a recent TED talk,
it’s surprisingly addictive.
So, where’s the crowdsourcing angle in all this? Well interestingly, the OCR quality of Google’s uploaded books varies widely.
Aiden and Michel found only about a third of the texts were good
enough to use as Ngrams. So, how about a little help from the crowd?
Google already use reCAPTCHA ³ to help decipher old New York
Times issues, why not go further? As we know from Digitalkoot, people are amazingly good at reading difficult text and love the chance to
contribute to worthwhile projects – especially if they are presented
in an entertaining form.
The crowd might even be able to tackle handwritten do­cuments,
and correct OCR errors (just try charting use vs ufe to see the prob­lems
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OCR software has telling “s” and “f” apart). Imagine a GoogleBookHunt
crowdsourced game – factual and fun, innovative and informative. It’s
the beft of all possible worlds.
1. Google books - Ngram Viewer
books.google.com/ngrams/
2. Jean-Baptiste Michel - What we learned from 5 million books - TED.com
bit.ly/oRfVR2
3. reCAPTCHA - google.com
google.com/recaptcha
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September 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Ancient Lives:
crowdsourcing makes
history (but will it last?)
It sounds like the perfect recipe for crowdsourcing success. Take
200,000 Ancient Egyptian scrolls and upload them to a beautifully
designed¹ interactive site.
Add a generous helping of positive publicity² and invite online
archaeology-lovers to get transcribing.
Welcome to Ancient Lives: a collaboration between crowdsourcing science experts Zooniverse³ and the University of Oxford. The
project uses crowdsourced volunteers to digitize the 2000-year-old
“Oxyrhynchus scrolls” (I guess the professional archaeologists are
busy raiding tombs and fighting Nazis).
Although the scrolls are written entirely in Ancient Greek, Ancient
Lives director Chris Lintott insists this shouldn’t deter the crowd:
“You don’t need to know Greek… you can transcribe these texts letter by letter. It’s just pattern recognition.”.
Goodwill hunting
Hang on a second, pattern recognition? What happened to discovering lost civilizations and unlocking secret histories? Ancient Lives
might sound glamorous, but the reality is scroll after scroll of slow,
painstaking transcription. Definitely not something that will feature
in a new Indiana Jones movie.
Not that there isn’t some real satisfaction in getting involved.
Along with a seriously slick user interface to play with, nothing
beats the warm glow of goodwill that volunteering from the comfort
of your home (or work place) produces. That and being able to tell
friends that you spent your afternoon transcribing ancient scrolls.
What lets the site down slightly, I think, is the rather basic user
engagement and lack of any real feedback system. Aside from the
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satisfaction of helping out, the only reward for transcribing a scroll is
(wait for it)… another scroll to transcribe. In my (admittedly biased)
opinion, a few game-mechanics – for example some structured levels
and rankings – could give volunteers the extra motivation to spend
longer on the site, and return later for more.
Crowdsourced research is fast becoming a popular academic tool
(it’s quick, cheap and doesn’t involve students – what more could
a professor want?). These days, dozens of universities and institutions are competing for online volunteers. So is goodwill, a glitzy
site and a big launch still enough to tempt the crowds? As usual,
only history will tell. Personally, I think if projects like Ancient Lives
liven up their game a bit, they will get more help from today’s online
volunteers.
1. University of Oxford - Ancient Lives
ancientlives.org/transcribe
2. Katie Scott - Armchair archaeologists asked to decipher ancient papyri Wired.co.uk
bit.ly/ojc4Jt
3. Zooniverse - Real Science Online
zooniverse.org/
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August 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Journalist vs. microworker:
a fair fight?
I’m about to share a shocking revelation. Seriously, sit down and
hold on to something. Ready? Here goes: astonishingly, it turns
out that a professional journalist who has worked for the New York
Times and charges hundreds of dollars per article, can write better
than freelance microworkers who charge $0.1 to $14 per task.
The man behind this “newsflash” is distinguished reporter Adam
Penenberg.¹ Here’s the story. Last year, microwork startup Serv.io²
contacted Penenberg hoping for some free publicity (they got that all
right). Instead of writing a regular piece, Penenberg decided to put
Serv.io’s microworkers to the test by “crowdsourcing the writing of
a profile about the company” using only “the Servio 120,000-member crowd”.
Crowd on crowd reporting
To kick start the process, Penenberg wrote 20 questions for the
Serv.io workers to research and answer. The workers took up the
challenge and eventually produced a 1000 word crowdsourced
company profile.³ That’s when the trouble started. As Penenberg
eagerly points out, the crowdsourced article is seriously flawed.
It’s too long, badly edited and unbelievably biased towards Serv.io
(try scrolling down to the part about CEO Alex Edelstein’s “Project
Runway” good-looks).
Adam Penenberg is a great writer and he does a brilliant job
of ripping the microworkers’ article to shreds. But what exactly
is his point? He obviously wanted the Serv.io workers to fail. The
whole exercise looks suspiciously like a setup. Few “real” journalists would be comfortable criticizing their bosses (how many News
Corps reporters dare to bad-mouth Rupert Murdoch?). Penenberg
demanded answers to 20 questions in a 400 word article – hardly
surprising the writers blew the limit.
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Word wars
Penenberg apparently believes that microworkers are a serious
threat to journalism: an evil cyber army out to undercut hard-working hacks. But take a quick look at Serv.io’s website. The company
never claims to employ or compete with journalists. Instead, Serv.
io offers a pretty standard mix of crowdsourcing services: SEO content, product descriptions for retailers, proof-reading. Does Adam
Penenberg want those jobs? I doubt it.
It’s time journalists stopped treating crowdsourcing as the enemy.
Crowdsourced content is not meant to rival the New York Times. It’s
a high volume, low cost writing model: a fast-growing business that
already employs thousands of people. Instead of ridiculing microworkers, reporters should investigate the real issues: worker wages,
spam requestors, cutting edge applications. Instead of cheap tricks,
how about experiments that push boundaries and test the crowd
fairly. Crowdsourcing and journalism are both here to stay. Let’s
stop sniping and get to the real story.
1. Adam L Penenberg
penenberg.com/
2. serv.io - Web Content at Industrial Scale
serv.io
3. Adam Penenberg - This Column Was Crowdsourced By Servio Fastcompany.com
bit.ly/n2B4DS
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August 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Twitter Predictions: the future
is just 140 characters away
Consider Twitter: 200 million users, 7 languages, 1 billion tweets a
week. Since it was founded in 2006, the site has been hyped, ridiculed, subpoenaed (by the U.S government¹ no less) and accused of
starting revolutions. From Lady Gaga to the Pope, everybody tweets.
For a Web 2.0 giant, Twitter’s functionality is surprisingly basic.
But (like Ikea furniture and Forest Gump) Twitter’s simplicity is
its strength. Everyday tweeters create a vast, searchable dataset of
thoughts and opinions – a 140-character global mood meter. Far
from being mere “cyber-babble” our collective tweets contain valuable information: what movies are popular, who we plan to vote for,
how a whole nation feels. Believe it or not there’s growing evidence
that if you ask the right questions, Twitter can even predict the future.
Movies, moods and markets
A 2010 study by HP Labs² demonstrated that the “tweet-rate” of prereleased movies can accurately predict future ticket sales. Basically,
the more mentions a movie gets on Twitter (positive or negative) the
bigger the box-office success. Similar techniques have been used to
successfully predict election outcomes in the UK and US, and (here’s
the really crucial example) X-Factor and American Idol winners.
In a more sophisticated Twitter experiment, Dr Johan Bollen³ of
Indiana University used mood-profiling software to analyze the actual
content (rather than just the volume) of millions of tweets. He found
that the “Twitter mood” of America closely corresponded to national
events. On Thanksgiving tweeters were unusually happy, just before
the presidential election, unusually anxious. Bollen also found a
strange (and potentially very lucrative) link between certain Twitter
moods and US stock market prices: after a calm Twitter day, share
prices rose; after an anxious day, they fell. Dr Bollan is reported to
have licensed his Twitter-prediction method to a London hedge fund
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(and so will presumably be retiring to a Caribbean island very soon).
Meaning overload
So far, Twitter experimenters have relied on relatively simple language-processing software to extract data from tweets. To get deeper
insights, you need to do deeper analysis. The trouble is that human
language is notoriously difficult for machines to interpret. Give
humans 140 characters and we insist on making jokes, using sarcasm, and loading statements with double meanings. Of course, my
professional instinct is to suggest crowdsourcing as a solution, but
even I have to admit that using micro-workers to analyze millions
of tweets per day is (just a little) impractical. But the crowd could
still play a role: microworkers could provide deeper analysis of key
groups of tweets or double-check machine accuracy by re-analyzing
random tweet samples. Plus crowd-generated feedback could be
used to train and improve language-processing software.
With a little imagination, the possibilities of “Twitter mining” are
endless. From advertisers tracing tweet product recommendations,
to politicians pre-testing reactions (positive, negative, incurably cynical), to government policies. One prediction I’m prepared to make
is that the future will hold a lot more research into the predictive
powers of social networking. In the meantime, I guess we all just
keep on tweeting.
1. Jolie O’Dell - Twitter Subpoenaed by U.S. Government for WikiLeaks
Accounts - mashable.com
on.mash.to/fKtT4V
2. Twitter Predicts the Future - KK.org
bit.ly/bf3l3m
3. Bollen, Mao & Zeng - Twitter mood predicts the stock market - arXiv.org
bit.ly/aeQzLP
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June 2011 by Ville Miettinen
VizWiz: what the crowd sees
is what you get
For most people the phrase “I just couldn’t live without my iPhone/
Android/ Blackberry” is just a figure of speech. We might love (or in
the case of Apple fanboys, worship) our gadgets but the majority of
us would probably still function without 24-hour access to touchscreens, wifi, and Plants vs. Zombies. For many disabled people
however, access to technology can be literally life-changing.
Over the past couple of decades there’s been a quiet revolution in
“disabled access technology”: un-sexy, practical applications that help
people get online and get on with their lives. There are now dozens of
purpose-built accessibility apps which incorporate assistive technologies like OCR and speech-recognition. These are impressive advances
but human-computer expert Jeffrey Bigham¹ believes that, with the
help of the crowd, things are about to get much, much better.
Remote assistants
As Professor Bigham points out, purely automated technologies
often struggle to cope with the “infinite variability” of reality. Here
at Microtask, we’re very familiar with this phenomenon. The whole
Digitalkoot project is founded on the fact that OCR scanners can’t
read old and/or handwritten documents. Similarly speech-recognition software, which converts sound to text, often fails to understand
strong accents and multiple voices (ideal if you just happen to be a
lonely elocution expert). Bigham’s solution is to backup the “fragile” technology with help from online workers (or as he calls them
“always-available human-powered services technology”).
To test the theory Bigham and his team created VizWiz, an iPhone
app which “enables blind people to recruit remote sighted workers
to help them with visual problems in nearly real-time.” It works like
this: users take a picture of whatever they need to identify, speak
a question and upload it to the crowd. Questions can be anything:
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what flavor are these noodles? Do these socks match? Is that guy at
the bar still sitting on his own? VizWiz workers examine the photo
and send back an answer. Simple.
Researchers trialled VizWiz with a group of blind users. The
results were generally positive with participants “uniformly excited”
about the potential of the system. Average response time was 67 seconds at a cost of $0.07 per question. A second trial (VizWiz 2.0) with
better photo software and a larger pool of workers cut the average
time to 27 seconds (although at an increased cost).
Killer app or stop-gap?
VizWiz is clearly an idea with potential, but is it a long term-solution
or just a quick-fix while we wait for AI to catch up with the crowd?
Are crowd-computer collaborations doomed to be the minidisc (as
opposed to the mp3) of disabled access tech? Already, fully-automated apps like LookTel Money Reader offer cheap solutions to
specific visual problems. Plus VizWiz is still very much an academic
research project. Will fresh-faced Team Bigham be able to compete
in the big bad commercial world?
Reading about VizWiz I was struck by how much users liked the
concept of working with a human crowd. Several participants even
thought the system should allow greater interaction between users
and workers. The “humanity” of VizWiz might be its greatest asset.
Unlike AI, human crowds can answer complex or even subjective
questions on pretty much any subject. With a bit of imagination (and
some serious investment) VizWiz could be developed from a simple
identification tool into a unique visually-aided Q&A service. Now
that really would be something worth seeing.
1. Jeffrey P. Bigham - Human-Backed Access Technology - University of Rochester
bit.ly/H1OLtO
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May 2011 by Ville Miettinen
A (cryptic) case for the crowd
An unsolved murder. An unbreakable cipher. Baffled police issue a
desperate plea: can anybody out there crack this code?
It sounds like fiction, right? Just add Matt Damon, a car chase
and a deadlocked high-security vault, and you’ve got a guaranteed
summer blockbuster. But in reality, this is the exact scenario currently being acted out by America’s premier crime fighting (and conspiracy-theory-generating) agency: The FBI.
Mental man hunt
The FBI has a long history of working with the crowd. Ever since
agents nailed up the first Most Wanted poster (back in 1919 apparently)¹ , citizens have been eager to aid “the Bureau” in the fugitivecatching business.
This March, the FBI published a unique appeal for crowd help.²
Here’s the story: in 1999, police discovered the murdered body of a
man in a field in Missouri. The killer left behind no evidence. The
only clues found at the scene were two encrypted notes, apparently
written by the victim.
For the last 10 years experts have tried and failed to decode those
messages. Now they’re handing the job over to the crowd. As Dan
Olson, head of the Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit
(racketeering? Have FBI chiefs been watching too much Boardwalk
Empire?), has stated: “Maybe someone with a fresh set of eyes
might come up with a brilliant new idea.”
Secrets of the past
The coded notes look impressively incomprehensible (and this is
an assembly language programmer talking). You might think that
a cipher which has defeated a decade of professional analysis is
pretty much certifiably unbreakable. But the history of cryptography (and computing) is rich in examples of “amateur intelligence”
breakthroughs.
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During World War II, amateur cryptologists were among the team
that helped crack the famous German Enigma code. Interestingly,
these 1940s code breakers left behind a massive archive of (some
still encrypted) papers which are only now being digitized. The
Bletchley Park Museum,³ which owns the archive, sadly won’t be
“gamesourcing” the digitization process itself (just imagine how cool
a WWII spies version of Digitalkoot would be!). But once everything
is uploaded, the museum does plan to crowdsource the skills of amateur historians and cryptographers to help research and decode the
records.
The FBI has reported an “outpouring of responses” to its crowd
code appeal. 70 years ago, human-computer intelligence helped to
end a war. Now, who knows, maybe it might just catch a killer. So if
you’re a math genius, a crossword puzzle freak, or managed to follow
the plot of Lost all the way through, get over to the FBI site and get
cracking.
1. A Byte Out of History - Fbi.gov
1.usa.gov/GQxRnT
2. Cryptanalysts - Part 2: Help Solve an Open Murder Case - Fbi.gov
1.usa.gov/gCmMuL
3. HP and Bletchley Park to Collaborate on Digitising Site’s World War II
Archives - blethcleypark.org.uk
bit.ly/doRfr5
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February 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Africa online 2011:
The mobile continent
According to a recent article in the Economist,¹ in most African countries more people have a mobile phone than a bank account. In technologically advanced Kenya, over 50% of the population now owns a
mobile. A friend of mine who used to live in Mali told me that many
young people there would rather go hungry than go without SMS.
In the West, all the money and media attention goes to smartphones – see the hyperactive press coverage of Nokia’s recent deal
with Microsoft.² However, while citizens of London and New York
are obsessed with the latest iPhone, in Nairobi the most popular
handsets are still the Nokia 5130 and 3110. But, even stuck with this
“classic” hardware, African companies have managed to come up
with some truly innovative applications.
Show me the money
If there’s one area where Africa leads the world, it’s mobile banking. The Kenyan company M-Pesa³ is a branch-less, mobile money
system that allows customers to transfer cash by SMS. In Nairobi,
apparently, you can even pay taxi drivers by mobile. The success
of services like M-Pesa is jaw dropping: in Kenya over $30 million
worth of mobile transactions are carried out every day. And, if there
really are more mobile phones than bank accounts in Africa, there’s
definitely scope for the sector to expand.
Mobile banking is a relatively safe way to move money, and great for
people in rural districts. It’s also a way of getting paid. Crowdsourced
work providers have been quick to catch on. Take the African business
directory Mocality.⁴ Mocality uses crowdsourced workers to write and
edit database entries, paying them via (you guessed it) M-Pesa.
Silicon Valley, Nairobi?
Over the last couple of years, the success of organizations like
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Sama­source, Txeagle, and, above all, Ushahidi (also from Kenya),
has really put African crowdsourcing on the map. New initiatives
are constantly jumping on the bandwagon (or on the bush taxi, perhaps). Many are health care or development projects, like Sproxil.
Operating in Nigeria and Ghana, Spoxil has developed software that
allows the crowd to authenticate drug labels via SMS. The aim is to
fight the huge trade in illegal pharmaceuticals.
Some entrepreneurs have begun to think outside the development
sector – moving towards more commercial enterprises. Eric Hersman,
one of the Ushahidi founders, recently set up iHub⁵ in Nairobi. iHub
is a building where developers can enjoy their natural habitat – fast
broadband, laptops, comfy chairs and strictly no dress code. The physical space is also a gateway to a wider, online community of developers, funders, clients and programmers – all keen to explore the commercial possibilities of Africa’s mobile and web revolution.
Speed limits
Last year, in a blog covering Africa, we wrote about the challenges
facing the budding tech industry: corrupt governments, instability,
lack of infrastructure and lack of basic resources. One year on, and
these problems are still major issues. One reason the mobile sector
is so strong is that high-speed broadband is still patchy and, even
in Kenya, overpriced and unreliable. People may be prepared to go
hungry in order to afford a mobile but, in a better world, no one
would have to make that choice.
But, as African companies are proving, necessity really is the
mother of invention. I personally can’t wait to see what the African
crowd has come up with by 2012.
1. Not just talk - economist.com - econ.st/hzLum4
2. Kevin J. O’brien - Together, Nokia and Microsoft Renew a Push in
Smartphones - The New York Times - nyti.ms/gCgoTn
3. M-Pesa - bit.ly/cdx0HH
4. Mocality’s crowdsourcing visualisation - Mocality Blog - bit.ly/bo041J
5. iHub - Technology, innovation, community - ihub.co.ke/
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February 2011 by Ville Miettinen
Language Lessons: translating
the global conversation
Over the years, computers have come a long way from being humble
adding machines. These days hardware is lightweight and good looking, while some software is so sophisticated it practically comes with
Michelin stars. Despite all this progress, one area where machines
have traditionally struggled is language translation (remember the
bad old days of Alta Vista’s Babel Fish?).
The problem is that human languages are too complex to be easily broken down into computer-proof algorithms. Machine translation, however, is now starting to evolve. Google, in particular, has
pioneered new techniques that work by using cloud computing to
trawl through and analyze huge numbers of multilingual documents online.
On the web, English remains dominant, and businesses still have
to speak English to survive. However, the development of web 2.0,
mobile internet and broadband mean people are spending more and
more personal time online. And, as life gets uploaded, so do languages. Our friends at the social network Xiha Life have even added
a “Translate button” to their site interface. Using machine translation, the button allows members (who come from over 200 countries) to switch between languages in real-time.
Facing the crowd
While machine translation is slowly improving, crowdsourced translation is booming. Take Facebook for example: in 2008 the social
network launched Translations, an open community where users
translate, review and verify new language versions of the site. There
have been some teething troubles¹ but, two years on, Facebook is
now available in 64 languages and counting. Similar crowdsourcing methods have been used by Twitter and Wikipedia (as well as by
smaller, but equally useful, sites like Italian subs addicted).
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But the “community translation method” isn’t always popular. In
2009, business network LinkedIn tried pretty much the same thing
as Facebook. LinkedIn asked members who were listed as professional translators to help render the site into more languages. When
users realized the work was unpaid, many refused and some even
said they felt insulted.²
I guess the lesson is to pitch to the right crowd. Facebook users
are there to socialize, have fun, and spam you with endless friend
requests. Translations became another way of getting involved and
meeting new people. LinkedIn, on the other hand, provides a service for business people. It’s a useful networking tool, but not necessarily a site users want to spend all hours of the day on or personally
help develop.
A crowded market
The big names of web 2.0 may choose to translate internally, but
crowdsourcing translation startups are also on the rise. There’s a
long list of companies offering everything from document translation to software localization.
Take servioTranslate, part of crowdsourcing heavyweight
CloudCrowd. ServioTranslate focuses on cheap (6.7 cents a word)
and speedy document translation. The process runs like an assembly line: text is divided up, put through a machine translation
and then distributed to the crowd (via a Facebook app) for error
checking and reassembly. In contrast, at German startup toLingo³
the mantra is quality. ToLingo boasts a pre-checked database of
6000 translators, guaranteed native speakers and “triple checks”
on documents. One potential issue with both startups is that users
have to upload text or documents individually. Compared to the
cutting edge services on offer, this seems old-fashioned and inflexible – the Servio uploader, for example, will only accept MS Word
documents.
It’s too early to tell which startup will emerge as leader of the
multi-lingual pack. The race is on to create a service with the perfect
combination of high speed, high quality and low-cost. Of course, the
only way to test if the crowd can really beat computers at translation
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is to try them out. If anyone’s had experience, good or bad, with
crowdsourced translation, we’d love to hear from you. Comments in
your language of choice.
1. Turkish pranksters load Facebook Translate with Swears - The Register
bit.ly/c4lpZu
2. Andrew Adam Newman - Translators Wanted at LinkedIn.
The Pay? $0 an Hour. - The New York Times
nyti.ms/QPNYG
3. toLingo translations
tolingo.com/
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November 2010 by Ville Miettinen
Crowds against the Machine:
will digital workers
soon be digitized?
Until October this year, I would have put driverless cars in the
same category as jetpacks, robotic maids and space elevators. All the stuff, in other words, that a time traveler from the
1950’s would expect to see gathering dust in our garage (“Gee
Mister, the Internet sure is a blast, but when do we go visit the
moon base?”).
Now, thanks to Sebastian Thrun & co at Google, we’re apparently one step closer to the world of tomorrow. During the summer Google’s self-driven cars secretly clocked up over 140,000 miles
around California. The cars are modified versions of Toyota’s Prius,
perhaps chosen as a nod to the Japanese who produced the first
driverless car back¹ in 1977.
All seeing eyes
The Google cars “see” using a combination of swivel camera, laser
and radar sensors (which makes the human eye seem even more
impressive). The vast amount of visual data is processed, along with
detailed maps, by the car’s Artificial Intelligence system which uses
it to navigate the road.
There’s been a lot of fanfare from Google about improved road
safety and impact on climate change, but no one’s really sure what
they plan to do next with the cars. The cost of the project hasn’t
been released, but I’m guessing it’s a little more than your average
Prius production run.
This isn’t the first time Google have experimented with cutting
edge A.I. –designing Google Street View, they used sophisticated
computer vision systems called ConvNets² to blot out faces and
license plates. ConvNets are capable of “deep learning”– they modify
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their own parameters when fed new information (something many
football fans seem to struggle with).
An artificial struggle
The sophistication of this technology is awesome, but is it good
news for the crowdsourcing industry? Without ConvNets, wouldn’t
tagging Streetview images be exactly the kind of microtask you’d
expect outfits like ours to distribute to digital workers? If a bunch of
robots will soon be able to complete such tasks faster and cheaper,
will microtasks become just a footnote in the history of A.I.?
Before we all pack up and donate our office space to cybernetics, it’s worth considering the fundamental premise of distributed
microtasks. As most people who read this blog know, microtasks
generally fit into a category known as human intelligence tasks,
or HITs. They exist because humans are still far better than some
things – especially related to vision and language – than computers.
HITs – while often very simple for us – are designed for the
nuanced, responsive intelligence that only humans possess.
Although your Dad’s dusty Commodore 64 can multiply numbers
faster than Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (unless the answer is
$100), the latest supercomputers are, overall, still laughably rudimentary compared with the human brain.
With our 3 billion year evolutionary head start, it is barely surprising that robots are nowhere near as sophisticated as we are. (Of
course, a chicken/egg issue arises here, and a smarmy robot might
argue that if we were smarter we could make them smarter again.
At that point I suggest unplugging it.)
The fact is that there may never be a time when A.I. meets all
of our peculiar demands. The vast cloud of crowdsourced labor
can react, almost instantly, to a mind-boggling variety of tasks
– from rating the emotional impact of an image, to decoding a
300 year old sentence of text. New applications and companies
are constantly popping up – from real time mapping aids for
the blind to the latest crowd funding initiatives (see The Daily
Crowdsource³ if you want to try and keep pace – you might even
spot a familiar face).
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In fact, the more computers enter everyday life, the more microtasks there are likely to be for distributed workers to help with. So
while the machines may be rising, I’m betting it will be a while before
they rival the power and ingenuity of the two billion people online
right now.
1. Jon Kelly - Could we ever learn to love driverless cars? - BBC News
bbc.in/d03f9P
2. Eye Robot - The Economist
econ.st/c0ggHR
3. Daily Crowdsource - Crowdsource Better
dailycrowdsource.com/
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Over the last two years, crowdsourcing has grown
from a little known concept to a respectable,
mainstream industry (well, almost).
This is a collection of stories that were posted on
the Microtask blog during this period of explosive
growth. In your hands you hold tales of industrious
moles, gamified worlds and feel-good co-operation
not seen since the hippie revolution of the 1960s.
We hope you enjoy it.