IFTF Panel (presenter)

I was on an Institute for the Future panel on the future of crowdsourcing, presenting a vision of the future of crowdsourcing that is somewhere between the current MTurk and oDesk. Also on the panel was Anand from MobileWorks.

Collective Intelligence 2012

Attented Collective Intelligence 2012. This was the first instance of this conference -- very well attended, and great talks. Collective intelligence is related to 'crowdsourcing', but broader, including remote work like oDesk.

MITCNC Crowdsourcing Panel (presenter)

I was on an MITCNC crowdsourcing panel. The panel had a good perspective of crowdsourcing from a number of different angles (I recall uTest was there, and I forget who else -- I'm writing this post half a year retroactively). Discussion included some talk about the potential for expert crowdsourcing with sites like oDesk, as well as the potential for 'crowdsourced education', where people may learn new skills in apprentice fashion doing jobs online.

HCI Lunch Talk at Stanford (presenter)

Presented TalentCourt informally at Stanford, motivating it with trying to identify experts quickly and reliably, and showed demo of writing and drawing games.

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