258 Guys in a Garage! Crowdsourcing an Entire Startup

philip-rosedale

via: FastCompany

About the author: Philip Rosedale is the creator of Second Life and a Co-Founder of LoveMachine, Inc.

My co-founder Ryan and I are having so much fun pulling together data and thoughts for my upcoming keynote at CrowdConf next week. It’s a great opportunity to try and summarize much of what we’ve learned over the last few years about whether and how crowdsourcing can be taken to the next logical (we think) level: to replace a bunch of what we’ve come to think of as the nature of “work” and “company”.

The Silicon Valley startup formula is now a well-recognized and time-honored strategy, which I think we’ve all worn into a bit of a rut: 3 or 4 very smart people (usually guys) hunker down in someone’s garage, work a bleary-eyed 80 hours a week producing a prototype, getting funding, hiring those first handful of key engineers, etc.

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Crowdsourcing and Retention: From First-Timers to Seasoned Veterans

Millions of people have participated in our tasks over the last few years, and tens of thousands of people are active at any given moment. However, crowdsourcing is not a traditional engagement model. Tasks are elective, which means people are free to come and go as they please. It’s a fair question, then, to ask whether they keep coming back.

crowdsourcing

Do people perform tasks only fleetingly, or has crowdsourcing become more of a long-term engagement? Furthermore, just how important is contributor retention in the world of crowdsourcing?

While a majority of people fall into the “one-and-done” camp, many of the most productive contributors tend to have participated in previous jobs. Within any single job, these seasoned veteran contributors also provide far more work than their less experienced counterparts.

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Enterprise Crowdsourcing or: How I learned to stop worrying and trust the crowd

Our recent post about confidence bias, where we showed that most contributors vastly overestimate their own ability to complete tasks correctly, raised a lot of questions about how we manage quality at CrowdFlower. You might remember these themes from such classic posts as: AMT is Fast, Cheap and Good or the Wisdom of Small Crowds series [1] [2] [3].

crowdsourcing

via: reddead.wikia.com/

The standard CrowdFlower model is agnostic towards the quality of any individual contributor. Typically, we let anyone attempt a task, using our technology to filter out low-quality contributors and score the responses. Without further ado, what follows is quick review of the steps we take to do that filtering.

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Crowdsourcing a Map, to Eat

A parmigiano reggiano aging room

Expanse of Cheese: Caseificio di San Silvestro's Aging Room in Castelvetro (MO)

Last May, I took a trip to Italy for two weeks. A little bit of history: my friend Jessica and I are both Italophiles, and when her mom sent us a link to a video contest where the prize was a round trip flight to Italy, we knew we had to enter. After a week of writing and editing lyrics in a Google Doc — half in Italian, half in English — the resulting music video ended up winning us a trip to the holy land of olive oil, vino, and other delectable edibles.

Apart from being a passionate eater, I’m a passionate supporter of the Slow Food movement, an organization which promotes good, clean, and fair food around the world. Each year, they publish a guidebook to restaurants in Italy that adhere to their principles. In Italy, this usually means each restaurant is handpicked to showcase the traditional food of a particular region; each restaurant supports artisanal methods and products that otherwise might go extinct (were eaters not eating them), and where the food is most likely naturally organic and local anyway.

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Confidence Bias: Evidence from Crowdsourcing

crowdsourcing

psychologytoday.com

Evidence in experimental psychology suggests that most people overestimate their own ability to complete objective tasks accurately. This phenomenon, often called confidence bias, refers to “a systematic error of judgment made by individuals when they assess the correctness of their responses to questions related to intellectual or perceptual problems.” 1 But does this hold up in crowdsourcing?

We ran an experiment to test for a persistent difference between people’s perceptions of their own accuracy and their actual objective accuracy. We used a set of standardized questions, focusing on the Verbal and Math sections of a common standardized test. For the 829 individuals who answered more than 10 of these questions, we asked for the correct answer as well as an indication of how confident they were of the answer they supplied.

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