Conference Indicates Need for Crowdsourcing Education

CrowdFlower‘s crowdsourcing conference, CrowdConf, took place for the second year in San Francisco Tuesday and Wednesday, November 1-2. The conference attracted hundreds of interested participants to UCSF to hear discussions on the practical uses of crowdsourcing.

Tuesday kicked off with simultaneous workshops on industry and business concepts from Omar Alonso, Matthew Lease, and Crowd Leader, David Alan Grier. Wednesday featured a full day of presentations from over 40 presenters, and here are a few of the highlights.

Grier opened the second day of the conference with the history of crowdsourcing. Yes, it began far earlier than 2006. Grier demonstrated how crowdsourcing has strong roots in mathematical computations.

Second Life founder, Philip Rosedale, demonstrated the power of crowdsourcing on the technical developments of a business by showing an example of a web app that was built mostly from crowdsourcing.

Jason Aiken, Community Director of 99Designs, talked about the need for education on both sides of the market – clients and crowdworkers. Education in the sense that on the 99Designs platform, inexperienced designers were getting involved early with each contest, and the more skilled designers were waiting till the end to pitch in. Educating the clients & designers about this behavior while identifying ways to avoid it help both parties get what they want with crowdsourcing.

Clickworker VP of Marketing, Mark Allen, indicated the dangers of crowdsourcing companies focusing purely on lowering costs. This sort of marketing strategy will turn crowdsourcing into a race to the bottom [of profits].

In the breakout sessions, Crowdsource.com CEO, Stephanie Leffler, talked about how they’re qualifying their crowdworkers to provide a better experience to their clients. In situations where a crowdworker must pass a qualification question in order to receive the actual task such as indicating their level of education, crowdworkers are known to manipulate the system by answering what they feel the client wants to know – college educated or higher. Leffler suggests asking separate qualifying questions to identify your labor pools with no connection to promises of future work.

Crowd Leader Rob Vandenberg, President & CEO of Lingotek, compared professional translation processes to crowdsourced translation processes. Crowdsourcing makes the translation system more collaborative while decreasing costs from an industry standard $0.23 per word to around $0.05 per word. Ebay ran a translation process of 1 million words at a cost of $0.025 per word – a 90% savings.

The second day came to a close with a poster reception filled with great conversations, insights, and even more questions as to what will the next few years hold.