10/16/11

UIST 2011

Attended UIST, a user interface conference, and the place that TurKit was published. The user interface community has a lot of interest in crowdsourcing and remote work for many reasons, including a source of user-study participants, as well as motivation to create collaboration tools like Max Goldman's Collabode tool allowing etherpad like collaboration in a shared Eclipse environment.

8/8/11

HCOMP 2011

Attended HCOMP (Human Computation) conference/workshop. It focusses a lot on crowdsourcing and games-with-a-purpose. Traditionally, the primary tool for this work has been Mechanical Turk, but there is growing use of oDesk, both to find expert workers, and for quality control purposes.

1/26/11

pictionary

John Horton and I plan to make a daily blog where people see an original drawing depicting an abstract concept like "dignity" or "empathy". People would supply guesses for the word, and see a word cloud of guesses for yesterday's word.

So, we need original drawings depicting abstract concepts like "dignity".

Here is my oDesk posting:

Draw Pictionary Word

Job Description


We want to hire 5 people to draw sketches for difficult pictionary words. This is a test task -- we want to see what quality of sketches people are willing to do for $2 (which isn't much, so it can be a rough sketch).

We will only be accepting $2 bids for this round (if oDesk does not allow you to bid $2, then bid $5, and we would ask you to do 2 sketches)

The word we want drawn is: "dignity" (and if we need two words, then the other word is "candid")

If you do not have an art portfolio on oDesk, please provide a sample of your art, or a link to some of your art.

Thanks!
Greg

We got our 5 people, shown below. The first person did two images, both of which are exactly what we were looking for. The rest of the images are good quality, but they expose a missing detail in our instructions. We need to say something like "please draw an image conveying the concept, rather than using word-play to get at the word."


Norway





United Arab Emirates


Bangladesh



Philippines


United States