Lan Luo Matt Cahalin Melissa Tumminia

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Overview:

1.) What is crowdsourcing?

2.) How big is the phenomenon today and how big is it projected to be?

3.) Which types of tasks are most frequently crowdsourced?

4.) Who are some of the major clients?

5.) Who are the major suppliers that help facilitate crowdsourcing?

6.) What is required for crowdsourcing to be effective?

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What Is Crowdsourcing?

“Crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.” – Jeff Howe The term “crowdsourcing” was coined by journalist Jeff Howe in a 2006 Wired magazine article.

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http://crowdsourcing.typepad.com/cs/2006/06/crowdsourcing_a.html

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Which Tasks Are Most Frequently Crowdsourced?

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What Are The Benefits Of Crowdsourcing?

• Information can be collected quickly and efficiently • Crowdsourcing benefits firms by potentially contributing significantly to innovation with careful analysis • Easy access to a global workforce with a wide range of knowledge Greengard, Samuel. "Following the Crowd." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 54.2 (2011): 20. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011

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http://stanford.academia.edu/tanjaaitamurto/Papers/1002829/The_Promise_of_Idea_Crowdsourcing_Benefits_Contexts_Li mitations

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What Are The Pitfalls Of Crowdsourcing?

• Research shows that crowdsourcing can favor popular opinion which in turn favors homogeneity • Crowdsourcing can be expensive • Crowdsourcing can be unreliable • Crowdsourcing requires no or little expertise from participants • No supervision of participants

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52.12 (2009): 12,n/a. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

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History Of Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing Was Made Possible Because Of Four Developments:

1.) The rise of the amateur class because, “The energy and devotion of the amateur compromises the fuel for the crowdsourcing engine.” 2.) The rise of a mode of production, open source software, provided inspiration and practical direction 3.) The proliferation of the internet and cheap tools because consumers now had a power that was once restricted to companies endowed with vast capital resources 4.) The evolution of online communities because they were able to organize people into economically productive units

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Business, Crown Business.

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History Of Crowdsourcing

Examples : 1. The Longitude Prize: In 1714 the British government offered a cash prize to anyone who could give a precise method for measuring a ships longitude 2. Oxford English Dictionary: Before the Oxford English Dictionary English dictionaries were incomplete and missing information, the Oxford English Dictionary changed that because volunteers helped to copy passages from various books and illustrate word usage.

3. Zagat Survey: In 1979 Tim and Nina Zagat began surveying their friends to collect and correlate the rating of restaurants by diners. Now Zagat surveys include over 70 cities with input from over 250,000 users rating everything from restaurants to zoos. Howe, J. (2008), Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, Crown Business.

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What Is Required For Crowdsourcing To Be Effective?

1.) The problem ( and its boundary conditions) must be well defined 2.) The population of potential solvers with relevant expertise must be large 3.) Feedback must be provided to the crowd (not just to individual contributors) so that ideas can evolve 4.) Mechanisms for managing intellectual property must be in place 5.) Someone needs to filter the ideas and develop them

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How Big Is Crowdsourcing?

• In February 2010 The Economist reported, data management and analytics are worth $100 billion and are growing at roughly 10% a year, roughly twice as fast as the software business as a whole. 2011.

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Lifestyle." The Futurist 45.4 (2011): 37,37-41. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct.

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Luis von Ahn ESP Game

• Luis von Ahn, assoc. professor at Carnegie Mellon University, is considered by many to be one of the pioneers of the idea of crowdsourcing.

• His research includes CAPTCHAs and human computation.

• Von Ahn created the ESP game to address the problem of creating difficult metadata.

• The idea behind the game is to use the computational power of humans to perform a task that computers cannot yet do, such as image recognition, by packaging the task as a game to encourage willing participation.

• The significance of matching images with words, is that it allows for improved searching capabilities as well as aids the visually impaired.

• The ESP game is a great example of using the masses to accomplish a particular goal

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Luis von Ahn ESP Game

• Rules of the game – Once logged on, user is automatically matched with a partner – Players cannot communicate, and will be shown the same image for which they will simultaneously enter possible words that describe the image.

– Players have two and a half minutes to match as many images with the partner as possible, and have the ability to pass on images they cannot successfully match.

– Taboo Words: these are words the players cannot use to describe the image, and are generated by the program after the response was matched a number of times in prior play. This allows for the image to receive multiple descriptive tags.

• Lets Play!

http://www.gwap.com/gwap/gamesPreview/espgame/

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Who Are The Major Suppliers That Help To Facilitate Crowdsourcing?

THE CROWD!

• • Depending on the needs of the organization participants may be any individuals with internet access Certain jobs may require individuals to have specific knowledge on a certain subject

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Who Are Some Of The Major Clients In This Space?

• Wikipedia • Yahoo! Answers • Mechanical Turk-based systems • CAPTCHA • reCAPTCHA

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Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 54.4 (2011): 86. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

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CAPTCHA Complete Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart

• Invented by Luis von Ahn • Is a program that can recognize whether its user is human or a computer • It is a program that creates and grades a test that most humans can pass but most computer programs cannot pass • Users must type characters into a text box, to get access to some kind of website • The bad part about CAPTCHA is that nothing is done with the text input

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reCAPTCHA

• Makes use of all of the hours a day people spend solving CAPTCHAs • reCAPTCHA gives users scanned images from old books and newspapers that are difficult for computers to decipher thereby participating in digitizing old books and newspapers •According to Luis von Ahn since 2007 around 400 milliion people have partaken in digitizing over five billion words

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Machinery.Communications of the ACM 52.3 (2009): 16. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

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Wikipedia

• What is Wikipedia

• Size of sales and profits • Not for sale • Wikipedia is a non-commercial website run by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization based in San Francisco. Its mission is to bring free knowledge to everyone.

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Continue Wikipedia

• Number of employees • • • • --- Volunteer (June 20, 2003) --- five paid employees (October 4, 2006) --- Carolyn Doran was named chief operating officer and began working as a part-time bookkeeper (Her departure from the organization was cited as one of the reasons the foundation took about seven months to release its fiscal 2007 financial audit.) --- the Wikimedia foundation had 65 employees (In May 2011)

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Continue Wikipedia

• Major products Powerpoint Templates

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia Page 19

Continue Wikipedia

• Crowdsourcing story  Editorial administration, oversight, and management  Handling disputes and abuse  Editorial quality review

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Mechanical Turk (MTurk)

• One of the oldest commercial crowdsourcing applications • Created by Amazon • Web-based platform for creating and publicizing tasks and distributing micropayments • Potential employers post tasks and workers select jobs they would like to perform • Payment is established up front and payments are facilitated through Amazon.com

• “Turkers” (workers for Mechanical Turk) select “Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITS) that match their interests and abilities • Some examples of tasks are classifying pictures, transcribing handwriting, website review, and consumer research Hoffmann, Leah. "Crowd Control." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 52.3 (2009): 16. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

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Web. 2 Oct. 2011

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MasterCard Worldwide

• MasterCard Technologies is located in O’Fallon Missouri • Technology development and operations center for global payment processing company • About 5000 employees worldwide, roughly 5,000 contingent resources • 2010 Net Income of $1.8 Billion • Averaging 140 milliseconds per transaction, MasterCard’s network processes over 22 billion MasterCard branded transactions per year • Traditionally a credit/debit payment processing technology company, MasterCard is now making significant investment in mobile and eCommerce .

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MasterCard.com-Bejoy Mathew

• Bejoy Mathew is a Senior Project Management Consultant in MasterCard’s Emerging Products and Consumer Solutions Development group.

• Bejoy led the MasterCard.com mobile application project in Spring 2011 • The MasterCard.com mobile application designed to provide a customer facing mobile app that showcased some of MasterCard’s corporate and consumer products as well as provide a direct link to the technical teams.

• The project followed the traditional waterfall project methodology, but there were challenges with the testing phase of the project.

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Mobile Application Testing Challanges

• The difficulty in testing web and mobile applications, is that they need to be able to perform on a wide variety of operating systems and browser configurations.

• Tradtional testing environments usually utilize a controlled “sandbox” environment, use one team of testers, and one set of test cases. Variability in user device configuration is difficult to predict.

• Testing is very expensive, testing on average makes up about 10% of a project’s labor cost. There were significant budget constraints with the project.

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Solution from the Masses

• Bejoy was aware of the crowdsourcing phenomenon, and got approval from management to leverage hundreds of employees from dozens of countries to test the application.

• The “testers” were employee volunteers that had a variety of devices, operating systems, and browser configurations. • While the goal of the crowdsourced pilot/trial was to “break” the application, some test proceedures were also issued.

• Dozens of defects were identified in the first day, and the feedback was overwhelming.

• Estimates to source the testing of this application either in house or in an SOW ranged anywhere from $30-$60k. • The result was a very low cost testing solution that found defects that the controlled test cases would have not been able to anticipate.

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Future of Crowdsourcing at MasterCard

• While most of MasterCard proprietary information is subject to financial regulation and cannot be shared publicly, there is significant opportunity to leverage the power of the crowd in the growing mobile and eCommerce from a testing and usability standpoint.

• “Testing the application with our employee volunteers was a huge success” Bejoy says. “Upper management is excited, I’ve been continuously meeting with various levels of the organization, Enterprise Architecture, and legal to see how much further we can expand this practice for our mobile application testing.” “Who knows where this can go, but it’s definitely on our radar.”

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Case Study - Goldcorp

• Goldcorp, run by CEO Rob McEwen, is a Toronto based gold mining company.

• In the early 2000’s, the company was struggling with strikes, debt, and a 50 year old dying mine lacking any remaining substantial gold deposits.

• Frustrated with the lack of production by in-house geologists, Goldcorp decided to post its wealth of geological data on its 55,000 acre property in hopes that anybody, could provide valuable prospecting information on where the next big deposit would be located.

• Goldcorp offered $575,000 to the participant who would provide the best methods and estimates.

• Over 1,000 participants from 50 countries submitted entries.

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Unconventional Approach?

• Mining, is one of the world’s oldest industries and usually governed by conventional production methods.

• The industry was stunned when Goldcorp revealed valuable proprietary information to the public.

• While definitely not the first open source approach, this was definitely one of the most unconventional for the mining industry.

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High Risk, High Reward

• Weeks after Goldcorp’s announcement, submission from all parts of the world came in. There were entries from academics, management consultants, mathematicians, military, and a mass of virtual geologists.

• "We had applied math, advanced physics, intelligent systems, computer graphics, and organic solutions to inorganic problems. There were capabilities I had never seen before in the industry," says McEwen. "When I saw the computer graphics, I almost fell out of my chair." • Contestants identified 110 targets, 80% of which yielded substantial gold deposits.

• For a $575k investment, 8 million ounces of gold were found which equated to 3 billion dollars.

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The Revolution of an Industry

• The radical prospecting idea produced more than just a wealth of gold.

• Goldcorp also gained: • • • • State-of-the-art technologies and exploration methodologies New drilling techniques New data collection procedures More advanced approaches to geological modeling.

• Goldcorp’s willingness to share some intellectual property led to their ability to harness the powerful new force of mass collaboration.

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Crowdsourcing Explodes in China

• China military is the biggest employer in the world.

• 2010 1st World Witkey Conference host in Guangzhuo China • Witmart is a Chinese crowdsourcing site that has four million workers. Another Chinese crowdsourcing site that boasts 2.8 million workers is TaskCN.

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Facts of Crowdsourcing in China

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Witmart

http://www.witmart.com/

• About Witmart

• Witmart.com, operated by ZBJ Network Inc., is an internet marketplace and workplace for non-physical products including services, designs and digital goods.

• Witmart.com is a global creative outsourcing service marketplace and aims to provide employers and providers the most reliant marketplace to post jobs and find projects.

• Millions of freelancers are skilled experts on design, writing, programming, planning, marketing from USA, India, China and more.

http://www.witmart.com/

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Witmart

http://www.witmart.com/

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Interview with former employee

• Learn from Witmart

• Never sell products, sell ways of thinking.

• There is no selling, only self-selling • All answers to your marketing reside in your prospect’s mind.

• Problems in Witmart

• Many copy websites • Unfair working enviorment for freelancers

• Crowdsourcing future in China Powerpoint Templates

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Best Practices For General Managers

• Control – managers must have control over the project in order to protect the company since outside users may not always have the company’s best interests at heart • Diversity versus Expertise – decide on a group of people based on ability to understand and contribute to the organizations need • Engagement – offer participants cash prizes, rewards, or recognition • Policing – have a code of conduct in place for participants • Intellectual Property – decide what and how much information to give to participants

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Bonabeau, Eric. "Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence." MIT Sloan Management Review 50.2 (2009): 45-52. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

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Crowdsourcing Trends

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Overall Message

• “ A large and diverse labor pool will consistently come up with better solutions than the most talented, specialized workforce.” -Jeff Howe

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Conclusion

• Crowdsourcing isn’t for niches, its on everyone’s radar • The benefits are limitless • What’s next?

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Sources Howe, J. (2008), Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business, Crown Business. Kenny, Charles. "Good Ideas for Bad Times." Foreign Policy.183 (2010): 72,72-75. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Orange, Erica. "Augmented, Anonymous, Accountable: The Emerging Digital Lifestyle." The Futurist 45.4 (2011): 37,37-41. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Doan, Anhai, Raghu Ramakrishnan, and Alon Y. Halevy. "Crowdsourcing Systems on the World-Wide Web." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 54.4 (2011): 86. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Favaro, John, and Shari Lawrence Pfleeger. "Guest Editors' Introduction: Software as a Business." IEEE Software 28.4 (2011): 22,22-25. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Greengard, Samuel. "Following the Crowd." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 54.2 (2011): 20. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Falcioni, John G. "Project Crowdsourcing." Mechanical Engineering 132.12 (2010): 6-. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

"Crowdsourcing Challenge Flow Restrictor Design." American Water Works Association.Journal 102.11 (2010): 89-. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Euchner, James A. "The Limits of Crowds." Research Technology Management 53.5 (2010): 7,7-8. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

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Sources Hoffmann, Leah. "Crowd Control." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 52.3 (2009): 16. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Kazman, Rick, and Hong-Mei Chen. "The Metropolis Model: A New Logic for Development of Crowdsourced Systems." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 52.7 (2009): 76. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Roman, David. "Crowdsourcing and the Question of Expertise." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 52.12 (2009): 12,n/a. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Lindley, David. "Managing Data." Association for Computing Machinery.Communications of the ACM 52.10 (2009): 11. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 2 Oct. 2011.

Bonabeau, Eric. "Decisions 2.0: The Power of Collective Intelligence." MIT Sloan Management Review 50.2 (2009): 45-52. ABI/INFORM Complete. Web. 9 Dec. 2011.

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