This question of commonly-seen tasks is one of the hardest ones for me, as a practitioner, to wrap my head around in terms of how to convey information in a useful way. For example, it’s *so* helpful to be able to point to a project using a similar type of data, with a similar goal, and say, “Here’s how this team did it, here’s what their output…[Read more]

Thinking about it, one of the challenges for people thinking about crowdsourcing ideas for the first time is understanding whether their idea is similar to established patterns, or if it’s novel.

Platforms tend to cater to projects that match common patterns of tasks, though each has variations in how they approach it. Entirely new or novel tasks…[Read more]

Common platforms include:

• The Zooniverse Project Builder
• FromThePage
• Scripto + Omeka
• Pybossa

This is only a starting point and doesn’t begin to address the strengths and affordances of each platform, or consider the other systems you’ll need around the platform to manage data going in and out.

The following is a bit of a brain dump of things I tend to say in conversations about crowdsourcing projects, based on my academic research and practical experience. I should really just dig out my teaching slides as they’re designed to anticipate common questions, but in the spirit of ‘the perfect being the enemy of the good’ I’m going to start…[Read more]

Thinking back over previous conversations and unpicking some of the assumptions people bring to them, I’ve kick-started with some questions I’ve heard a few times. I’d love to know which ones resonate, and more importantly, what questions you’d add:

• How do I manage data quality?
• Is the overhead of picking and figuring out a platform worth it?…

[Read more]

Obviously this has all been postponed – we had a backup date in October but at this stage it’s too difficult to make any definite plans.