May 12th, 2010
by Alexander Sorokin
The meeting was extremely interesting. The audio didn’t work, so we had a “not so much Distributed Distributed Work meetup” said Chris. The beer and mingling played substitute for the first talks. I very much hope the talks and discussions were recorded, because ours was so interesting.
After we won an indecisive victory over the projector, Alek Felstiner entertained us with an incredible presentation. He walked us through his thinking of how the outdated law designed for factories and workers could be applied to paid crowdsourcing. The main question is “Who are crowdworkers: crowdemployees or crowdcontractors?”
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May 1st, 2010
by John Horton
Online labor markets dramatically lower the cost and hassle of conducting experiments. On Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, it is easy to run multiple experiments per week. Figuring out how to run experiments isn’t that hard, as there are already some nice tutorials available.
However, what I felt was missing from the field was a discussion of why, precisely, we can trust results from online experiments. This was the motivation for a new paper, jointly written with Dave Rand (who wrote up part of this study here on the Dolores Labs blog) and Richard Zeckhauser.
You can download the paper here.
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April 29th, 2010
by Lukas Biewald
Since we do distributed work, why not have a distributed meetup? This time we’re making our meetup even more accessible by holding it simultaneously in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. As usual, we have a set of speakers covering a wide range of topics that I’m really excited to hear.
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April 23rd, 2010
by John Le
When I think of a job that needs to be done, like laundry or dish washing, I always look for the best person for the job. My roommate comes readily to mind. I wouldn’t trust anyone else with my dirty work. But for a job where workers are located all over the globe, we cannot always be sure of their trustworthiness. So where in the world are our workers coming from? And how good are they? The following is a graph for a job sent through CrowdFlower to Amazon Mechanical Turk (amt), Gambit (gambit), and Samasource (sama).
Though we cannot reveal the complete details of the job, can you guess what kind of task it was, who the task was made for? Each circle represents workers from a particular location, the size of the circle representing the number of judgments those workers made. Colors range from red to yellow to green, indicating how much we trusted the workers.
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April 20th, 2010
by Zack Kass
This spotlight is the first in a series profiling the faces of crowdsourcing.
As the news of Haiti’s catastrophic earthquake broke, Fred Michel, a graphic designer living in Montreal, followed the international coverage intently. He wanted to find some way he could help. He learned of Mission 4636 and went to work translating emergency SMS messages.
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