Experiences in Crowd Sourcing
ARwJgR Of course, I understand a little about this post but will try cope with it!!...
LiveOps
Sheel Tyle
I am in the process of signing up as an inexperienced bilingual (Spanish & English - I'm conversational, not fluent, in Spanish, but let's see how much I'm tested on it) LiveOps call center agent. There are videos on the website from independent agents, testimonials on the sidebar ($15-22/hour), and press releases from various periodicals that try and convince.
There are five steps that I must follow in order to be 'submitted for review':
Validate your email address
Verify your understanding of the general requirements
Provide basic information on your background
Assess your comprehension and computer skill
Audition your voice
Under 'basic information', here are some of the questions:
Have you ever contracted your business with LiveOps in the past?, Do you have prior call center experience?, Are you currently licensed to sell both health and life insurance products?, Are you currently licensed to sell both property and casualty insurance products?, Do you have prior experience in sales?, Do you have prior experience taking calls from Radio offers?, Do you have any experience in outbound telemarketing?, Do You Speak, Read and Write Spanish - FLUENTLY?, Do You Speak, Read and Write French - FLUENTLY?
I said "No" to every one except "Yes" to speaking Spanish.
Then, under 'comprehension and computer skill', I had to answer questions like:
Please read this script:"We dont want you to miss out on this great offer, so what I can do for you today is offer you 1 HotBrush for 3 easy payments of $29.99 plus $14.75 to cover processing or you can take advantage of our special offer, the SpeedyHeat model for only $6.67 additional per payment. The SpeedyHeat Model contains a computer chip which lets your HotBrush heat up faster and hold a more even temperature just like the most expensive professional quality hot tools. So, would you like to order the HotBrush or the SpeedyHeat Model?"
In this script, is the customer choosing between two different products or are they deciding whether to add a product (for two products total)? Deciding whether to add a product Choosing between two different products
What is the keyboard shortcut to move between windows you already have open on your computer? Hold down the "Alt" button and press the "Tab" button Drag the window offscreen Click the appropriate button in the task bar Close the program you are currently working in, and open a new one Minimize the window you are currently working in
Finally, the voice test. LiveOps asked me to call in to a 1-800 number and, when prompted, read two passages: one in English and one in Spanish.
Submitted. Once I hear back, I'll update whether I was accepted =)
Ramesh Nagarajan
I've completed the agent qualification process to become a LiveOps representative. Sheel did a good job of explaining the basics of the qualification process, so I'll share two observations I had about the process.
First, there's a fair amount of legal language LiveOps uses, with the intention of disclaiming any liability or even the existence of much of a relationship between it and its contractors. One must agree to the following: "I understand that LiveOps will investigate all of my information provided during the Agent Qualification process, and that Certification of my home business to contract with LiveOps will be contingent upon successful completion of a criminal and credit background check." They aren't currently accepting Massachusetts residents as LiveOps contractors -- perhaps Massachusetts's laws are too worker-friendly -- so I hope that means I get to avoid the "criminal and credit background check." Also, I didn't have to provide a Social Security Number, which makes me wonder if there is a real background check. Going back to the phrase I agreed to, I found it interesting that LiveOps representatives are setting up "home business[es] to contract" with LiveOps. There seem to be at least two advantages that LiveOps has over traditional telemarketing and call center companies -- first, it could save money on infrastructure by having employees work out of their own homes and use their own computers and phones, and second, it could save money by not having actual employees. I wonder which is more important, and if the second is a necessary part of the company's business strategy.
On a lighter note, the questions for "comprehension and computer skill" were quite entertaining. I was asked if booting a computer meant to turn on the sound, throw it out, turn it on, or add extra drives, and I had to decipher the meaning of a call script. I think there's a good chance I got one of the questions wrong. It asked what a customer paid today for a product that had "an upfront trial payment" of $15, three monthly payments of $40, and a shipping and handling charge of $10. I answered $15, but when I think about it, maybe it should be $25.
Online mass collaboration project
Franny Lee
While waiting for my little sister to finish teaching her last Grade 9 class of 2009, I fell into conversation at an Ottawa (Canada) Starbucks with Russell Maier, a professional collaborative multi-media artist and a fellow fan of peppermint mochas. Russell is currently cycling around the world to help promote and orchestrate a âplanetary collaborative mosaicâ art/photo project, based upon the ancient cultural concept of a âmandalaâ. The first grand â1Mandalaâ is slated to be unveiled in front of the NYC UN Headquarters in May 2010.
The projectâs theme - global peace and togetherness: âAs a celebration of our Oneness we are building a collaborative planetary mandala. Our mosaic 1Mandala is being built out of pictures of people of all places and cultures smiling peace to the world. These "peace portraits" are being arranged into a Mandala-- an ancient circular and geometric art-form long-used by the world's spiritual traditions for healing, unity and raising consciousness⦠It will be a powerful symbol of humanity united in the intention of peace to each other and the planet. â¨â¨We invite you to share your peace and your portrait with the world.â
Photo contributions are accepted through the project's website at http://www.1mandala.org. From my conversation with Russell, I get the sense that artistic vision currently dominates the project. Issues of communicating his project to a global audience are forefront (in addition to the website, Russellâs blog of his travels http://missive452.blogspot.com/ and the âdaily e-blastsâ with the âpeace portrait of the dayâ, this project participates in Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon), while intellectual property or privacy concerns have not been addressed other than with a simple website privacy policy and release (see 2-paragraph âPrivacy and Releaseâ at http://www.1mandala.org/en/uploader). Photos are (or will be) screened by a member of his team at some point before the final UN premiere, however, Russell prefers not to interfere with individual contributions unless the photo is deemed absolutely inappropriate. His logistical vision is to ultimately develop a fully automated online photo contribution process. There have been very few (I believe less than 5) instances where a photo has been refused - if I recall correctly, one may have involved something about a turkey.
After creating my peace picture, I began the online contribution process and was required to register my email address, first name, city and country. After completing registration, I received an email with instructions for my photo contribution, which included general tips for âpeace portraitsâ and a hyperlink to the contribution uploader webpage. From there, I completed the web-fillable form by uploading my peace portrait, advising of my city and country, and was given the option of adding a photo caption and including a story about my photo. A box for the privacy policy and release and a box to confirm that this is an âintentional peace portraitâ must be checked off to proceed to the next steps, which are to crop the photo to the project size as per the instructions provided, and finally, to submit the photo. I kept experiencing âInternal Server Errorâ messages while trying to submit my peace portrait, and finally contributed through the alternate method of emailing a copy to peace@1mandala.org.
Amanda Peyton
Nov. 4, 2008 is a day that brought both metaphorical and tangible change to the White House. For many Americans, the day holds special, "memorable" significance.
A young filmmaker at IFC named Jeff Deutchman decided that the day would be worth capturing (regardless of the outcome of the election) in many different cities, so he enlisted a few friends to film highlights from Election Day that he then spent a few months editing into a proper documentary.
But then he realized that by only using the footage from his friends, he was ignoring what was surely massive amounts of footage and still photos from those outside of his personal circle. He started a website, www.11-4-08.com, where people can browse, upload and edit footage from November 4th into their own "documentaries". The participatory site will launch in conjunction with the film's screening at a prestigious film festival in March.
The website accomplishes several objectives, and touches upon a few themes of mass collaboration:
1. If people watch the documentary and enjoy it, they can continue to interact with the film through the website
2. It allows history to become personal - while there were certain events on Nov. 4 that everyone in the country shared, this website - like many popular tools on the web, allows the user to personalize their experience.
3. It connects people who previously would have had no interaction by letting them access, watch and edit each other's footage
My involvement with this project has been to brainstorm how to structure the crowdsourced part to ensure ease of use and maximum participation. When putting together a site where the first objective is to prompt some sort of participation from the user (as opposed to straight consumption) there are several elements that I believe are critical:
- Clear objective of what you want from the user. For this project it's clear - to contribute still photos and footage from Nov. 4, 2008. I believe that this request is focused enough that the user will not be overwhelmed. If you make your requests too broad often times the user will get overwhelmed.
- Recognition. A large motivator for those who participate in crowdsourced projects is the incentive structure. How will the participants be recognized? (This could be a separate essay in itself - Amazon, Yelp, Reddit, Stack Overflow and Hacker News all boast their own incentive structures to encourage participation).
- Speed and Tech - the back-end technology needs to be seamless. For this project, the challenge has been to identify an in-browser simple video editor that will allow people to take existing footage and edit it into their own mini-documentaries. Currently, video editing software is large and bulky, but there are a few companies that are building simple browser-based video editing tools. Also, as Google has taught us, the site needs to be fast. The fastest way to scare away users is to have a slow site (just ask Friendster).
When the film is shown in March and the project launches, I am very curious to see how people will use the site and how participation will materialize.
Sharona Hakimi
A November New York Times article http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/technology/internet/17maps.html?_r=1&nl=technology&emc=techupdateema1 about a wikipedia-style mass collaborative mapping effort sparked my interest in various grassroots and industry induced efforts to find the best and most helpful way to "map"the world around us. We all use google maps, and with the satellite images and street-view capabilities, google maps has helped define the way I travel now, especially as they become readily available on our cellphones. However, as the article discusses, mapmaking is largely political, and left solely to google experts to decide what to map, how quickly, and from which views, we are leaving it to strangers with a vested interest. Hence, organizations like OpenStreetMap and wikimapia have come about in an effort to democratize mapmaking, leaving it in the hands of reliable locals to show just where the nearest coffee shop or library is.
I played around with three different mapmaking websites (one of which is sponsored by google, and another which partners with it to lay your data on top of google maps).
The first website I tried is OpenStreetMap (http://www.openstreetmap.org/) which is a non profit aimed at making free maps that can be reused by anyone. According to NYTimes, it has some 180,000 contributors who have mapped many countries in varying levels of detail, and it even has its own twitter account. Although I love the idea behind the website, I think the layout is actually really confusing, and the search is terrible. It's set up as a wiki, allowing contributors to edit and discuss various changes. It was a bit of a hassle to sign up for an account, and any contributions have to be authorized, so I have yet to see if my additions to my neighborhood in Toronto (a pharmacy, a synagogue, etc), were added.
The next website I tried is wikimapia (http://wikimapia.org), which partners with google maps, allowing users to create specialized maps on top of google. I spent some time trying to label buildings at Harvard Law school, but when I actually tried confirming the changes it said it was already labeled (though it didn't seem to be). Overall I found this website a lot easier to use and I like the layout more, although the search function is also not very good.
The last one I used was Google Map Maker (http://www.google.com/mapmaker), which immediately opens a very user friendly help box explaining the user's role ("Your work as a citizen cartographer will appear on Google Maps and serve the needs of local users, schools, city planners, tourists, and more."). Although I hate to say it, since this "democratization" of mapping is initiated by a for-profit industry member, this website is by far the most advanced and user friendly, and I found it really fun.
Overall I'm a really big fan of the democratization of mapmaking, and I think it fits with the general concept to have various websites that function in different ways to do the same thing. As the technology becomes more advanced, I think all three websites will get even better. I definitely believe that mass collaboration is extremely important and even necessary in making making maps in the 21st century.
TwitHawk
Elisabeth Oppenheimer
(Formerly TwitterHawk, but Twitter made them change the name.)
The TwitHawk space looked forlorn, so I took a quick look at it. It's pretty clever. You set up a search -- say, people tweeting about Amazon Mechanical Turk within 25 miles of Palo Alto -- and the app updates you when someone tweets on that topic. You also set up some prepared responses ("Iâm studying Amazon Mechanical Turk for a class, how has your experience with it been?") which are automatically sent to anyone who matches your search. You can also change the settings such that you need to confirm before sending your message, or so that you automatically follow anyone you message. It's basically a marketing tool: in the example they give, a coffee shop searches for local people tweeting about a desire for coffee, and then sends them the address of the shop.
The concern in the press coverage is that this will massively spam Twitter users, but the owners have taken some useful steps to prevent this--you have to pay 5 cents per message, you can only send one message to a given user, and you can only send one message every two hours.
I'm impressed with the service, although Iâm still fundamentally stunned that Twitter and Twitter apps have morphed so quickly from a "huh? why would you want to do that?" phenomenon to a "cornerstone of all cool marketing campaigns" phenomenon.
Reuben Rodriguez
First things first. As mentioned above, Twitterhawk is dead. Long live Twithawk! I think Elisabeth did a pretty good job of describing what Twithawk does so I'll keep my description to the bare minimum: Twithawk is basically a tool that sends preset replies to other Twitter users whose tweets match whatever search results you have set up. Twithawk gives new registrants 10 free auto-replies, so I set up a new Twitter account and gave it a spin.
I decided I would be tweeting as HarryDoyle97 and accordingly constructed a search for any mention of the word "Indians" within 25 miles of the Cleveland area. I created three pre-set responses and set up the search to run once every two hours. Within 10 minutes, Twithawk had sent out my first auto-response (JUST a bit outside) to Indians on Fan Feedr in Cleveland, Ohio. It was all very easy.
Elisabeth discusses the critics' main concern about how Twithawk could be used for mass Twitter spam and she mentions the steps Twithawk has implemented to try and combat this possibility - the five cent per reply cost and the limited frequency with which a response can be sent. There is also subtle encouragement to use the Twitter feed as more than just a robot automatically replying to search results. Each "campaign" that you set up has a meter on your dashboard labeled "TwitterHawk Noise Ratio" with an arrow pointing from green to red. It then rates the ratio between Twithawk responses on your feed vs. "natural" (read: by an actual human being) responses and encourages the user to keep the ration below 25% (1 Twithawk response for every 4 real ones). While this may not deter those with the real intent to spam, at the least it serves as a helpful reminder to the well-meaning, but inattentive marketer to keep their feeds from being mere spam. Finally, the FAQs asks those who feel that Twithawk is being used for spam to report the spammers and notes that Twitter is active in punishing spammers. If Twithawk remains vigilant, the product definitely has potential.
Tyler Lacey
I used TwitHark too. My goal was to find people complaining or wondering about on the status of the (often late) Boston subway and bus system called "The T" and run by the MBTA. So my search was simple: I merely searched for terms such as "MBTA", "T", "late", "delayed", etc. that posted within 5 miles of Boston. My response was to tell people about the official MBTA twitter feed (MBTANow) that already supplies people with very up to date information. I set TwitHawk to send this response automatically.
I suspect that my response will annoy more people (at most 10 really, since I am only using my ten free responses) than it helps for two reasons. The first is that "within 5 miles of Boston" is too coarse of a search area. It will likely define lots of people that do not or can not use the T and exclude many people that do use the T. This difficulty is a symptom of the my second, more general, complaint with TwitHawk's search mechanism: it is too simplistic. For something as delicate as searching the millions of twitter posts and responsing in a useful manner, I think I need more than the simple list of terms that are presumably searched for in an "or" fashion, narrowed by a single location. I would prefer something more akin to regular expressions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regular_expression) that would let me specify precisely the strings that I am searching for, as well as a more precise manner of specifying locations (so I could use something like "within 1 mile [Town]" for every town near Boston that the T serves). This way I would be able to target posts that are more likely complaning or inquiring about the status of the T and search within an area that more closely resembles the T network rather than a circle extending out from the center of Boston. I believe that this advanced search capacity should be built into TwitHawk using a more sophisticated search builder interface. This would allow users not familiar with the complexities of regular expressions to make use of their flexibility. However, an API or program that sat on top of TwitHawk could achieve a similar result by flattening a regular expression into many simpler searches and automatically entering those searches in TwitHawk. However, for complicated regular expression searches this would create an unmanageable number of simpler searches for TwitHawk to store.
I also noticed that a captcha is the only thing that seemed to be standing between me and multiplying my ten free opportunities to spam into millions of free spam messages by automatically creating TwitHawk accounts and setting them to the same searches. Without knowing the internals of TwitHawk I can't be sure what defenses exist to prevent this.
Drumbeat Privacy Project
Michael Feldman
Ok. So I was intimidated by some of the other possible projects such as Twithawk and Mechanical Turk. Signing up for things and following directions? Ew. So, the clear solution was to try and tackle the creative problem proposed by Drumbeat to simplify various internet companies' privacy policies, a la Creative Commons. The idea is to create a simple structure of icons, images and phrases to more effectively communicate a companies privacy policy without requiring the user to sift through a ton of dense legalese.
In creative commons, each icon which stands for a particular set of rights the author wishes to protect. But this won't work for privacy policies because the policies are different for each company. They don't merely invoke a set of already-delineated rights. One organization called Privacy Choice has already tried to create icons to simplify the process of learning about companies privacy policies, (see http://www.privacychoice.org/whos_watching). But this website is not completely effective since it requires the user to "mouse over" various categories of privacy policies, only to encounter much more "mumbo jumbo."
It seemed to me that the primary design problem was that there are multiple levels of information: specific data within specific provisions within general categories. So I tried to create an idea for a basic system which used the Privacy Choice Categories (plus a few others I thought would be relevant), color coded them so that a user could tell which categories might require greater attention, and then placed the provisions on a rather vague scale. While not as specific as an ultimate solution might want to be, this at least gives a user site-specific information that will be useful before delving into the actual text. From here, the next step would be to create a stock of short phrases which could appear when the user mouses over the icons which would give more detailed information without resorting to large blocks of text.
All in all, the challenge is very interesting and definitely something I would be happy to continue to work on over the next few weeks. The specific challenge of conveying all information in a given privacy policy in simpler symbols is one which will likely require involvement of the actual companies to conform their policies to set rubrics (or at least stock modular blocks of text), but short of that, it might be possible to create a more intuitive set of symbols that could be more generally applicable to all policies. But then there would still be the problem of aggregation of information since people would have to go through each policy to decode it and re-encode it into the new system.
You can find the actual suggestions I posted to drumbeat here: https://wiki.mozilla.org/Talk:Drumbeat/Challenges/Privacy_Icons.
Bruno Magrani
If Firefox is about making the web better through software, drumbeat intends to be the twin brother that focus on connecting project ideas and people together to promote a better web. In a way, one can think about it as an incubator for projects to improve people's experience on the web.
Because the project seemed quite exciting to me I took the liberty to exchange some emails with the people involved to get a sense of how I could be of most help to the project and decided to collaborate coming up with other examples of people who are contributing to improve the web. This first initial experience â being able to chose how to best participate in the project â denoted one of the wonders of online peer production: the advantage over traditional industrial information production systems in terms of information gains regarding how to connect a person's interest with a specific task.
If one important component of the project involves coming up with ideas for projects an equally important component involves getting real life examples of who is doing what to improve the web. It works both as way to recognize the efforts of these people, but also to stimulate other people to do the same and start their own initiatives. In a sense this is intended to send a message saying: everyone can and should contribute to make a better web.
One of the things that I notice while reading the projects and people being featured was that they were too much focused on experiences happening in the United States and some in Europe, so I decided to come up with examples of what both common and notorious people were doing in a developing country such as Brazil. My contribution can be found here and I'm definitely going to keep contributing to the project.