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.

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.

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