Web's Largest listing of crowdsourcing and crowdfunding events
Web's Largest Directory of Sites2,358 crowdsourcing and crowdfunding sites
Researchers have presented Legion, a system that enables real-time control of existing interfaces by the crowd. Prior approaches to crowdsourcing require programmers to encapsulate tasks into new...
Crowdsourcing has been shown to be an effective approach for solving difficult problems, but current crowdsourcing systems suffer two main limitations: (i) tasks must be repackaged for proper...
Crowdsourced labor has begun to level the playing field with respect to job access. This lends greater meritocracy to the job market: it is a natural extension of what the Internet has already...
Microtask enables seamless, real-time and scalable on-demand outsourcing. Their service is based on proprietary service platform, which automatically divides assignments into tasks, distributes...
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...
Far from turning on its creators like a modern day Frankenstein's monster, technology may in fact help us to deal with the ever-swelling deluge of data that is clogging up the hard drives of the world's research departments.
One of the great goals of computer science is to embed human-like intelligence in common applications like image processing, robotic control and so on. Until recently the focus has been to...
In this paper, the researchers propose a model-driven approach for the specification of crowd-search tasks, i.e. activities where real people – in real time – take part to the generalized search...
Encouraged by the positive response, scientists are now challenging online gamers to go one step further and design new proteins that do not exist in nature. The not-for-profit computer program...
Ville Miettinen writes in once again, this time discussing the definition of crowdsourcing. He highlights two recent studies of the crowdsourcing process which hope to narrow down and phrase exactly what crowdsourcing is. While one study produced a detailed technical analysis of the various crowdsourcing processes and mechanisms, the other took a more philosophical approach to try and come up with the simplest possible definition.
Michael Bernstein introduces computational techniques that decompose complex tasks into simpler, verifiable steps to improve quality and optimize work. He presents two crowd-powered systems:...
Q&A is massive, far bigger than many realize! Four of the top Q&A sites are in comScore’s Top 100 web properties, generating a staggering 15 billion page views between them. I wanted to know what the future had in store for Q&A, and why predictions were being made that the emerging winners from this space will soon rival Google for next generation search. Indeed, with Google’s February 2010 acquisition of the social-networking start-up Aardvark, which allows users to “tap the knowledge of people in your network” along with Facebook’s launching of its Question functionality, it’s clear that this is seen as big game. I recently interviewed Shawn Schwegman, Chief Marketing Officer of ChaCha to find out why Q&A is so big, and to learn where it is headed.
“Wicked problems are those for which no single computational formulation of the problem is sufficient, for which different stakeholders do not even agree on what the problem really is, and for which there are no right or wrong answers, only answers that are better or worse from different points of view,” explains Thomas Malone, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and founder of the Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI).
The intractability of the wicked problem is what first inspired Malone to dream up the Climate CoLab. Global climate change is a perfect example of the wicked problem. There is a deadlock of perspectives on how to address climate change, how severe it is, and whether it is even real. People with different political and economic viewpoints will answer these questions differently. Malone imagined a tool that would be able to represent these mutually contentious perspectives but guide them towards solving problems and generating strategies for addressing climate change.
A few weeks ago, I was attending the NSF Workshop on Social Networks and Mobility in the Cloud. There, I ran into the NIST definition of cloud computing (PDF).
After reading it, I felt that it would be a nice exercise to transform the definition into something similar for the dual area of "cloud labor" (a.k.a. crowdsourcing).
3 attention-grabbing start-ups from TechCrunch Disrupt are as follows: Babelverse is attempting to use a hybrid crowdsourcing model to find real-time human interpreters around the globe. San...
Many scientific advancements in prior centuries can be attributed to a single individual or, at most, two to three people that have either independently or jointly innovated. However, advances in technology, global communications and social interactions have meant that the 21st century will be recognized as the century where mass collaboration changes the paradigm.
Citizen Science has become more of a differentiator as scientists are now turning to crowdsourcing to engage large communities of home scientists to help process vast amounts of data and to draw accurate conclusions from scientific research.
There are a myriad of possibilities in the search for crowdsourcing milestones that announced its advent and its adoption as a model for online production, problem solving and for organizing for collective action: Commercial applications, advertising campaigns that succeed or backfire, funding for entrepreneurial ventures. This list of one dozen focuses on the pinnacles that demonstrate crowdsourcing’s highest potential: For public good, scientific research and technological innovation.
Each of these events involves a seminal moment when crowdsourcing came into greater public awareness being driven from calls to action that resulted in ever increasing numbers of individuals working together in a manner that has raised our collective consciousness.
We have selected our landmark crowdsourcing events based on criteria that make them notable because of their scale, their impact and the extent of their outreach to a wider audience both demographically and geographically. See if you agree with our choices!
Aaron Koblin is an artist specializing in data and digital technologies his work creations of digital art formed from real-world and community generated data. His projects have been shown at international festivals including Ars Electronica, SIGGRAPH, OFFF, the Japan Media Arts Festival, and TED.
Aaron’s work represents some of the best examples of how masses of otherwise innocuous information can be processed to create beautiful, but equally complex visualizations of data derived from thousands of individual actions. Aaron has also been experimenting with the aggregation of data derived from the collective actions of individuals.
uTest will have an end-to-end suite of testing services for web, desktop or mobile apps, adding to its existing services like functional, usability and load testing. uTest CEO, Doron Reuveni says...
When Seth Priebatsch, CEO at SCVNGR, delivered his audaciously provocative presentation at TED he was talking about how to motivate the crowd when money isn’t the currency. You can call the approach of rewarding certain online behaviors (or penalizing others) 'Gamification', 'Game Mechanics', or 'Social Rewards', all are being equally banded about and are receiving lots of buzz. Whatever you call it, it’s all about the motivation of the masses...we’ll call it Gamification.
The options for presenting a range of digital incentives and rewards is theoretically infinite but the primary design elements include motivational triggers such as: positive (and possibly immediate) feedback (e.g. a sound that quickly becomes recognizable upon the successful completion of a task); noticeable advancement through the “game” upon successfully performing the work (e.g. progression to a new level); awarding points, badges, and status levels, etc. (see Gowalla, GetGlue or Foursquare).
Gamification however can be about much more than just driving online engagement by awarding users tokens that represent their various levels of achievement – some refer to this type of consumer engagement as 'Pouring Chocolate on Broccoli' (a very Germanic expression meaning to simply spice something up that is a bit boring). Used in this manner, the greater potential of using Gamification is somewhat lost.
Founded in 2010, the industry website, Crowdsourcing.org, is a neutral organization dedicated solely to crowdsourcing and crowdfunding. As one of the most influential and credible authorities in the crowdsourcing space, Crowdsourcing.org is recognized worldwide for its intellectual capital, crowdsourcing and crowdfunding practice expertise and unbiased thought leadership.
