Learn about real-world applications — & get a discount

Guest post by Mollie Allick
Director of PR & events, CrowdFlower

On Nov. 1, CrowdFlower will be kicking off the second annual CrowdConf, the world’s largest crowdsourcing conference, at Mission Bay Conference Center in downtown San Francisco. This year’s conference will bring together more than 600 attendees to discuss innovations in crowdsourcing technology and trends taking place in the growing industry.

The main conference will be all day Wednesday, Nov 2. The agenda will focus on practical tips and tools for understanding crowdsourcing through a range of lenses including investing, philanthropy, community building, and creativity. The day includes keynotes, debates, and interactive breakout sessions, and will conclude with a networking poster reception.

Speakers include: Jeff Howe, author who coined the term “crowdsourcing”; Philip Rosedale, Founder of Second Life; Mark Gerson, Chairman of Gerson Lehrman Group; Charlie Cheever, Founder of Quora, Sharon Chiarella, vice president of Amazon Mechanical Turk; and more than 50 other incredible speakers representing the most influential and fastest-growing crowdsourcing companies. Check out the full list of speakers.

Additional learning opportunities

For those looking to learn more, be sure to join us one day prior to the main event on Nov. 1 for two great workshops that will focus more on research and industry-specific tutorials. Workshops offer conference attendees a head start as they engage in a more intimate exchange with other thought leaders and crowdsourcing experts. Workshops will be taught by: Omar Alonso, Technical lead on the Bing team at Microsoft; Matt Lease, assistant professor at the University of Texas; and David Alan Grier, columnist at IEEE Computer. Space is limited, so register now.

Discount for Socialbrite readers

Socialbrite readers can get a $75 discount by entering the code SCLBRTORG when registering.
Register at Eventbrite.

Event details:
What: CrowdConf 2011 – www.crowdconf.com
When: Workshops: Tuesday, Nov. 1 (10am-3pm); Conference: Wednesday, Nov. 2 (8:30am-6:30pm)
Where: Mission Bay Conference Center, 1675 Owens St., San Francisco
Cost: $75 for workshops, $450 for conference
Register: http://crowdconf2011.eventbrite.com/

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Target audience: Nonprofits, social enterprises, NGOs, foundations, businesses, educators. This is part two of a two-part series on crowdsourcing. Also see:

• How nonprofits can use crowdsourcing to work smarter and save money

One of the most fascinating phenomena in the Web 2.0 world the past couple of years has been the rise of crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing comes in a few different flavors (which part 1 covered yesterday). For nonprofits, social enterprises and businesses, the real potential for disruption comes when a global labor force applies itself to a crowdsourced project.

That’s where CrowdFlower comes in. Since my interview with founder-CEO Lukas Biewald at SXSW 15 months ago, the start-up has grown from 15 to 60 employees and is now headquartered in a spiffy second-floor space in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Mollie Allick, director of PR and events for CrowdFlower, talks about what crowdsourcing is and how nonprofits and other organizations can use the power of the crowd to advance their mission in this 4 1/2-minute interview at their offices. “We take large datasets and break them down into small tasks and distribute them to a labor force across the Internet,” she says.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

It’s not just about reducing costs. CrowdFlower was one of the partners in the collaborative mobile relief effort Mission 4636, which we wrote about following the Haiti earthquake last year. The short code emergency response communication system enabled earthquake victims in Haiti to get life-saving aid by sending a free mobile text message, which local volunteers translated as needed.

One important thing CrowdFlower brings to the party today is that they’re the organizers behind the biggest crowdsourcing gathering around: CrowdConf, to be held Nov. 1-2 at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco, geared to both industry and the academic sector. Last year’s event drew almost 500 people.

Crowdflower is also organizing smaller events in Washington, DC, New York, Boston and Austin, Texas. Other crowdsourcing events include ClickWorker, held June 15 in Berlin, and the Crowdsortium Symposium, held in May at Google.

Some of CrowdFlower’s nonprofit customers include the University of Southern California, the environmental media organization Dialogue Earth, Caring.com, a portal for aging parents, spouses and loved ones, Doximity, a mobile collaboration network for physicians, and the social good organization GVF, whose team has spent the last 10+ years developing a global system to prevent pandemics.

Keep your eye on crowdsourcing and see whether you might find a use for it in the months or years to come.

Related

• Helping Haitians via mobile, crowdsourcing & social media (Socialbrite)

• CrowdFlower: Toward a world of crowdsourced labor (Socialbrite, 2010)

• The Extraordinaries: Building the ‘micro-volunteering’ movement (Socialbrite)

• Harnessing the crowd for social good (Socialbrite)

• Is Crowdsourcing Really the Industry’s Dark Side? (Waxing Unlyrical)

The post How CrowdFlower powers crowdsourced labor appeared first on Socialbrite.

Target audience: Nonprofits, social enterprises, NGOs, foundations, businesses, educators. This is part one of a two-part series on crowdsourcing.

By Lindsay Oberst
Socialbrite staff

High-quality work at a low cost. That’s what crowdsourcing can achieve for nonprofts that wish to save money while pursuing their mission.

Crowdsourcing refers to harnessing the skills and enthusiasm of those outside an organization who are prepared to volunteer their time contributing content or skills and solving problems, sometimes for free, sometimes for a fee. An offshoot, crowd funding, describes the collective efforts to pool their money together on behalf of a cause, project or business. Kiva (loans to entrepreneurs), Crowdrise and Kickstarter (raise funds for creative projects) and Greenfunder, which launched in May as a site to raise funds for socially responsible projects and businesses, are among the burgeoning number of crowd funding sites. (See a few others in our roundup of 24 tools for fundraising with social media.)

Crowdsourcing, a bit of a catch-all term, can be used to gather information, solicit advice, save money or get stuff done. It can also help to inform decisions, demonstrate inclusiveness and bring a whole new meaning to collaboration.

We’ve seen the rise of community crowdsourcing with the advent of social media, but it’s always been part of the way society works. And nonprofits have always been at the forefront of crowdsourcing long before the term was coined in 2006. The idea simply fits in with the way small organizations work.

Here are a few quick, low-key ways crowdsourcing works

Say you’re a nonprofit looking to improve your services. You ask your Facebook fans and Twitter followers — people who have chosen to connect with you — how they think you can become better. They feel included in the process and want to answer, and then your organization has a solution to its problem. That’s what crowdsourcing can do — it can get a job done.

Or take blog posts. Studies show that people respond better to posts with images, so your organization seeks to include a photo along with the information you provide on your website. Where can you find images? Two good starts are Socialbrite’s Free Photos Directory and Flickr’s directory of Creative Commons photos, with 160 million photos available under various licenses. Both can be used to find free photos that you can use for your website, blog posts, reports, presentations and more — just give the photographers proper attribution.

Or maybe you’re wondering if your idea has been tried before — say, if someone has already learned lessons from running a fundraising campaign using Twitter? (Yes.)

Organizations are already using crowdfunding, crowd voting and crowdsourcing to gather information and improve the way they work. You’ll find that there are a handful of companies and services that offer crowdsourcing as their core business, such as CrowdFlower and Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, while other companies use crowdsourcing to deliver other services, such as Elance (a marketplace for freelance services), All Our Ideas (a platform for crowdsourced suggestions) and GeniusRocket (a logo and Web design service).

3 examples of nonprofits using crowdsourcing

Samasource

A number of nonprofits have taken the plunge and begun taking advantage of the new landscape. One of our favorites is Samasource, a nonprofit whose entire model is based on crowdsourcing dignified work to a workforce based in developing nations. Here are three other examples of nonprofits using crowdsourcing.

1All Our Ideas (“a suggestion box for the digital age”). This open source software is free to use and allows viewers to vote on ideas and add their own. Matthew Salganik, who created the project and works in the department of sociology at Princeton University, says it “allows the best ideas to bubble to the top.”

Catholic Relief Services, a nonprofit, is the official international humanitarian agency of the Catholic community in the United States. They wanted to evaluate all the workers in each of their offices around the world. All Our Ideas gave them an internal platform to source ideas from their workers, the people who know best about how everything works.

This idea platform is not limited to nonprofits or work evaluation. Others using it include the New York City Mayor’s Office and The Washington Post, which used it to increase reader participation.

2GeniusRocket (“the first curated crowdsourcing company”). According to GeniusRocket president Peter LaMotte, two forms of popular creative crowdsourcing exist. The first is what 99Designs offers. They outsource logo and Web design services to the public.

The second is what he calls “curated crowdsourcing.” His company creates solutions using vetted professionals and everything is kept private. They began using the first method and then realized some nonprofits didn’t want their messages blasted across the Internet, nor did they want to sort through hundreds of submissions.

“We make it a lot more affordable for nonprofits to source creative marketing content, yet we have a professional community,” LaMotte said.

Nonprofits use GeniusRocket primarily for the creation of videos and customizable content.

3Spot.us. “Community-funded reporting” is the tagline of this crowdsourcing service. United Roots, an Oakland-based nonprofit that uses music to help kids heal and learn entrepreneurial skills, is one example of how crowdsourced reporting can be used to create community-based coverage. Five of their stories were funded through Stories for Good and Spot.us.

For other similar services, see this answer on Quora. The Techsoup.org blog also has some good examples of nonprofits using crowdsourcing services.

As you can see, the possibilities of crowdsourcing are extensive. It still has limits, and it may not be the best solution for every nonprofit or organization, but it’s worth considering in the right circumstances.

Want more crowdsourcing?

• We recently showed our readers on way to crowdsource web design on the cheap.
• Our earlier article about 15 ways to crowdfund a project.

Coming Thursday: Look for our interview with Mollie Allick of CrowdFlower.

Related

• Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing (Socialbrite)

• Tap into the collective power of your community (Socialbrite)

• Crowdsourcing a presentation at SXSW (Wiser Earth Blog)

• Social good crowdsourcing (Mashable)

• An app to support refugees working in Africa (Socialbrite)

• 10 kickass crowdsourcing sites for your business (Econsultancy)

• 6 Great Crowdsourcing Sites For Freelancers (Sitepoint)

• Crowdfunding: Investment for Good (Care2)

The post How nonprofits can use crowdsourcing to work smarter and save money appeared first on Socialbrite.

Probably the most intriguing addition to the conference landscape is the upcoming inaugural CrowdConf, the first conference that focuses on the emerging field of crowdsourcing and the future of distributed work. Researchers, technologists, outsourcing experts, legal scholars and artists will gather Oct. 4 in San Francisco to discuss how crowdsourcing is beginning to transform the democratizing and flattening of the global labor market.

I hope to make it there, though a planned Air Force blogging expedition to Hawaii may prevent it.

Lukas Biewald, CEO of CrowdFlower, is spearheading the creation of the conference, which includes a call for papers with a deadline nine days from today. Here are the details:

When: Monday, Oct. 4, 2010, 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m.

Where: The St. Regis Hotel, 123 3rd St., San Francisco

Tickets: $350 before Sept. 13, with discounts for students and researchers. Register here.

Speakers include: Tim Ferriss, Author, “The 4-Hour Work Week”; Sharon Chirella, VP, Amazon Mechanical Turk; Maynard Webb, CEO, LiveOps; Jonathan Zittrain, author and Professor of Law and Computer Science, Harvard.

Call for papers and posters: Submission deadline Sept. 1, acceptance decision Sept. 15. More info: http://crowdconf.com/papers.html

Related

• Crowdflower: Toward a world of crowdsourced labor

• Helping Haitians via mobile, crowdsourcing & social media

• An app to support refugees working in Africa

• Harnessing the crowd for social good

• Calendar of 2010 social change conferences

The post Crowdsourcing conference coming to SF appeared first on Socialbrite.

Crowdflower: Toward a crowdsourced world from JD Lasica on Vimeo.

One of the most interesting start-ups that keeps popping up on my radar screen is Crowdflower, which connects nonprofits and companies with people around the globe looking to work on crowdsourced tasks.

It’s a fascinating glimpse at future contract labor models and at how work relationships are becoming more distributed, global, ephemeral and efficient.

Crowdflower takes simple tasks and breaks them down, using a global network of workers to determine, say, if a tweet about a brand is negative or positive, or if a piece of content violates a site’s community guidelines.

The person might spend 2 minutes on a task, an hour, or more. “The advantage is that the person doesn’t have to drive to work, they don’t even have to sign up for a website. They can just come to a job post, accomplish a task and get paid — in minutes,” says Crowdflower CEO and founder Lukas Biewald.

I spent three minutes chatting with Lukas at an extremely noisy rooftop party at South by Southwest Interactive. The video won’t win any awards for aesthetics — I was being jostled while holding a Kodak Zi8 hi-def camcorder — but it’s evidence that when you meet interesting people, it’s good to have a handheld recorder in your pocket.

Watch, embed or download the video on Vimeo

One mind-blowing angle: You’d be surprised at the number of people willing to perform tasks, such as in a Facebook game, in exchange for virtual currency that can buy them more trees in Zynga’s Farmville or more weapons in Mafia Wars. “People don’t realize how much this virtual money means to people,” he says.

Its website says Crowdflower provides access to an “elastic workforce” of more than a half million workers in over 70 countries — including refugee camps and developing nations where a few dollars go a long way.

As I understand this, CrowdFlower workers (they call them “customers”) complete large-scale jobs on a piecemeal basis in a quick, efficient and inexpensive manner. Similar in some respects to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the arrangement is task-based and avoids the need for lead time and overhead associated with traditional hiring and outsourcing.

Samasource, which we’ve written about in here and here, has a similar but somewhat different model that’s focused on ongoing work relationships with specific groups in developing countries.

Both Lukas and Samasource CEO Leila Chirayath were on a panel at the Commonwealth Club this spring that I caught. Crowdlower, Samasource, Ushahidi and FrontlineSMS were also involved in Haiti relief efforts using crowdsourcing and mobile phones, which we wrote about in February.

Related

• Samasource enables socially responsible outsourcing

• Helping Haitians via mobile, crowdsourcing & social media

• An app to support refugees working in Africa

• Harnessing the crowd for social good

The post Crowdflower: Toward a world of crowdsourced labor appeared first on Socialbrite.

New platform revolutionizes the way emergency response takes place

Guest post by Katrina Heppler
envisionGood.tv

Bravo to the thousands of volunteers worldwide who are assisting with translating Creole mobile text messages to help people in Haiti following the devastating 7.0M earthquake that struck the nation Jan. 12.

You may not have heard of Mission 4636, but this is where a lot of the most remarkable relief work is taking place. Mission 4636 is a short code emergency response communication system that enables earthquake victims in Haiti to get life-saving aid by sending a free mobile text message. It’s a joint-project of Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, CrowdFlower and Samasource.

Mission 4636 — named for one of the SMS short codes for Haiti relief efforts — is an outstanding example of global collaboration and the power of human ingenuity to help people and save lives through technology. A huge “hats off” to them as well as to the many organizations that have also come together to make Mission 4636 successful: inSTEDD, DigiCel, local radio networks, local NGOs and the many emergency responders.

In the video interview above, Brian Herbert of Ushahidi, Robert Munro of FrontlineSMS, Lukas Biewald of CrowdFlower and Leila Janah of Samasource share background on how they came together with the support of other organizations on the ground in Haiti to deploy a critical emergency communications system to help save lives and provide emergency resources to people following the earthquake. This is a massive effort across multiple non-profit and for-profit companies and individual volunteers from around the country and globe (more than 14 countries have been involved in translation).

In the weeks after the tragedy, text messages to the dedicated Haiti emergency short code 4636 increased about 10 percent each day – with about one text a second coming through. Technology and people power are playing a critical role in getting information to military and aid workers on the ground. Beyond the immediate help for people in need in Haiti, the program will build computer centers so Haitian refugees can do valuable digital work, get paid, and bolster the economy around them.

Transcript of our interviews

Here’s a transcript of my talk with each of the participants:

Interview with Brian Herbert: Web developer | Ushahidi

Katrina: What is your role and what is Ushahidi?

Brian: Ushahidi is a platform that allows anyone to crowdsource crisis information, or crowdsource anything really, using a mobile phone.

Katrina: How does Mission 4636 work?

Brian: What happens is that someone on the ground in Haiti will send in a text message of their location and their needs to “4636″ that populates a queue that is mostly all Creole messages that we can’t read because we speak English. The volunteers will take the messages, they’ll translate them, add any additional notes and categorize them. And when it goes to Ushahidi, we have some volunteers at Tufts University and they do a little bit more in-depth research into each message and we pass it on to the Coast Guard or Southern Command, and they’ll do emergency response.

Katrina: How did the collaboration come together so quickly between FrontlineSMS, Ushahidi, Samasource and CrowdFlower?

Brian: After the earthquake hit, Josh Nesbit of FrontlineSMS came to us with the opportunity to use a short code to collect this information to be put into Ushahidi. But the only problem was that everything was in Creole so we had to get everything translated.

So from that point we had to develop some software which is before CrowdFlower and Samasource came along. We started translating the messages that we’re coming in and sending them to Ushahidi and inSTEDD with the Thomson Reuters Foundation using the Emergency Information Service.

Katrina: I understand that a lot of the cell networks were down, right? Originally. So how did you get the word out that this service existed? How did you let people know to call or text message “4636″?

Brian: In the very beginning, Nicoletti Tata with inSTEDD was actually on the ground at Port au Prince airport. And he was able to go out to various radio stations and have them broadcast the number to have people text in their location and needs. And that’s how we’ve been doing it so far: through the radio channels. And also through the diaspora here in the United States and Canada they’re letting their friends and family know.

FrontlineSMS

Interview #2 with Robert Munro: Translation Volunteer Coordinator | FrontlineSMS

Robert: So my role right now is coordinating all the translators who are reading every single messsage as they come in, translating them, geo-coding them, and then passing them on to the teams that coordinate the emergency response.

Katrina: Why did you look to crowdsourcing as a way to translate messages?

Robert: So with FrontlineSMS, we’re looking at ways to automate the processing of messages but this is not easy when you get a lot of variation as you do in Creole between spellings. So we had to make the decision very early on to crowdsource rather than automate the process.

Katrina: How did you partner with Samasource to assist with this crowdsourcing effort?

Robert: Samasource wasn’t onboard early on. We just managed to find all our volunteers through connections with different social networks. It was very viral – the volunteers themselves took it upon themselves to make known that this effort was going on and spread the word.

Katrina: How are you partnering with Samasource and CrowdFlower?

Robert: CrowdFlower and Samasource have been partnering for some time. Samasource had already been training a team of about 100 people in Haiti for micro-tasking. So, the opportunity to move away from volunteers to relying on paid workers in country, creating jobs and adding local knowledge to the further evolution of this project has been a wonderful process.

Katrina: What has been the biggest success of Mission 4636?

Robert: I think the biggest success has been the way that people from all around the world have been able to come together and make a very real-time difference at a very remote location in the world, saving people’s lives.

Katrina: So, in addition to the technology of the platform you’re using to power Mission 4636, you’re also taking advantage of social media and social networking, and perhaps other tools where people are able to find out about volunteer opportunities through Mission 4636. Are people using Twitter, Facebook, things like that?

Robert: They’re using both and Facebook has been great. Certainly, the ability to connect to people remotely and put out messages like this has been instrumental in getting many volunteers involved.

CrowdFlower and Samasource

Interview #3 with: Lukas Biewald: Founder | CrowdFlower Leila Janah: Founder | Samasource

Katrina: What’s next for Mission 4636?

Leila: The project started off with volunteer translators from around the world. And Samasource specializes in providing digital work opportunities for the people who need them most. So we thought it would be amazing if we could get Haitians who are on the ground and affected by the earthquake and who have lost their livelihoods to earn money by doing these translations.

And so we had actually accepted a partner organization called “1000 Jobs Haiti,” which is affiliated with Paul Farmer’s group, Partners in Health, about 20 minutes before the earthquake happened. And right afterwards they told us that people in Haiti need jobs now more than ever. And there have been people fleeing Port au Prince and arriving in neighboring towns like Mirabelle where our partner is based with no livelihood and no future job prospects.

Jobs are really at the core of rebuilding Haiti. And as tragic as the earthquake was, it’s really exciting that we can use this as an opportunity to create jobs. So we’re shipping netbooks – 20 netbooks I think are scheduled to arrive in Port au Prince next week and we’ll have Internet access running in Mirabelle the following week and between 15 and 20 paid Haitian translators working on “Mission 4636″ text messages as their first contract before the month is over. And we hope to be able to transition them to other kinds of digital work after that.

Katrina: What is the business model for this? Is the State Department or who is supporting this initiative?

Leila: Well a number of aid organizations actually need this information and it’s really costly for them to send their people out on the ground looking for disaster victims, so I think this system makes relief much more efficient. And so perhaps some of the money that would have been allocated to having extra people in the field to deal with this can now be allocated to paying for this translation. And in the future this might be a model that governments can fund for 911 or similar emergency response services.

Katrina: That’s amazing. So this platform is completely revolutionizing the way that emergency response takes place, first of all, and with rebuilding efforts. I can’t imagine with previous natural disasters it didn’t seem like there was a really quick way, a communications systems in place to respond as quickly. And you’ve demonstrated with your partnerships that that’s possible. How do you see future emergency response delivery?

Lukas: You know, I had never thought of this application of our technology, and it feels really good. It feels like a natural use of our routing and our quality control and our task-doing software. It’s a great application, and we’d love to see it used for something that saves lives.

Leila: And likewise, this is a really exciting application of paid crowdsourcing. You know, having the crowd be Samasource workers is really exciting for us. And the workers needn’t be in the same location as the disaster. In this case it happens to be really useful because Haitian Creole is not really spoken outside of the Haitian community. But one can imagine other situations where the disaster response is crowdsourced, and maybe the crowd is some combination of people in-country and out-of-country in order to get the fastest results.

Lukas: Yeah, there’s something really powerful about imagining that a disadvantaged person in the Congo, for example, could help someone in Haiti. I mean we obviously haven’t gotten to the point where that’s something that’s set up yet, but there’s something that feels really amazing about that.

Katrina: Is there anything else you’d like to add? Any parting thoughts that you’d like to share?

Leila: I really think this whole project is not just an example of the power of crowdsourcing to be manifested in new ways like in disaster response, but also the power of social media and the new technology we have. I mean, between Skype and Twitter and Google Documents, we’ve been able to collaborate with people that I’ve never met in person, and I think Lukas has just met a tiny fraction of them in person. And that would never have been possible even just a couple of years ago.

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CrowdFlower & Samasource tap the cloud to fight poverty

A new free iPhone application, Give Work, released today lets iPhone users use their phones to provide work to refugees in Africa.

The project, a collaboration of Samasource and Crowdflower, lets you support refugees working in a datacenter in Dadaab, Kenya — the world’s largest refugee site — through “micro-donations” of time, time, not money. (We wrote about The Extraordinaries pioneering the micro-volunteering movement yesterday.)

Samasource’s Refugee Work Program trains refugees in technology-based skills and then puts those skills to use by connecting the trained refugees to stable, dignified work. CrowdFlower built the Give Work iPhone app, based on its crowdsourcing technology, to enable users to directly provide meaningful, paying work to refugees in the Samasource program.

“Working with CrowdFlower and iPhone users, the refugees we train in Kenya develop portable work skills and receive higher wages,” Leila Chirayath Janah, founder of Samasource, said in a news release announcing the project. “By training women, youth and refugees to complete paying remote tasks, we give them the ability to build livelihoods and become part of the digital economy.”

A range of tasks

The idea behind Give Work is to list a host of quick and easy tasks to be completed by the app users. Each task is real work for a real company. Tasks may include creating keywords for images or video clips to make them more searchable in a database, classifying text or finding points of interest online or in the real-world for numerous questions.

The app will let iPhone users directly help refugees in Africa get computer-based work experience and a paycheck through crowdsourced labor. Each task a refugee completes is given to an app user to verify — and the refugee gets paid for the work. The project’s managers laid out this scenario:

• A company in the Midwest needs online images checked for copyright issues so submits the job to CrowdFlower.
• A refugee in a Kenyan datacenter checks pictures for copyrights.
• An American iPhone user gives some of his or her time checking the same pictures to verify the refugee’s work.

All of this happens in a matter of minutes: The company gets quality work results, the iPhone user has fun and kills time while helping the world, and a refugee who was disenfranchised and unable to work is suddenly earning income, said the project organizers.

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