#crowdconf

Large volumes and simpler effort focused items work best for crowdsourced systems. More intelligence and high-touch work requires a skilled laborer on an outsourcing focused system.

@crowdconf in SF. Paying the crowd panel - tens of billions paid out to freelancers. - Eran Karoly, COO, Tipalti - Nagarajan Rao, Vice President, transpay - Lisa Shields, CEO, hyperWALLET Systems Inc - Jareau Wade, Co-Founder, Balanced moderated by Rich Arnold, CFO & VP Strategy & Corporate Development, CrowdFlower International fees are hard to avoid. Banks love to charge for this service. E-wallets like paypal are great until you want to spend that money. That's when the business model really takes a bite out of the freelance community. The only bank to avoid a wire fee is to do a "local transfer" into a bank or to have your own payment network. The real challenge/goal is to fund accounts in their native currencies (with all of the require legal process covered), almost immediately. PayPal impressed people with their speed. But their fees killed the long term dominance. White-labeling is possible with transpay, hyperWALLET, etc Compliance is a part of the picture from a sending and receiving standpoint. Someone in the payment stack must take the regulatory agencies. Crypto currencies (bitcoin) are paving the way. iTunes credits will allow kids to work on their cell phones. Banks are increasingly paranoid and reluctant to deal with these new players like crypto-currencies.

@crowdconf in SF. Best crowdsourcing practices for e-Commerce from eBay. Lorenz Trockle, eBay "eBay is a very complex marketplace"... Lorenz has been driving the crowdsourcing effort for eBay, and has seen it all. "It's hard to do this." He talks about the challenges of how these crowd labor professionals will issue "judgements" in their work. The quality control mechanisms are often-times overly punitive against the workforce. There are many "traps" that allow eBay to ensue higher levels of data quality. It's a test for tests. There are ways of man-handling the system / process to drive the workers into a direction and get more focused results. eBay could be running 5 to 8 crowdsourced projects each week, 60-90 total per year. eBay, (like YP) has a compartmentalism view of their crowdsourcing expertise, keeping their brain-trust in-house, serving their own people with their internal consultancy. Projects are picked and triaged one at a time before they are up and running. eBay data is so complex that they have to run various internal software mechanisms to clean and process data prior to its usability on the platform. eBay is working to spit out their search system into verticals. Each vertical has its own special parameters and usages and platform nuances. They're looking to creatively refine each of those experiences. Lorenz: get to know your crowd. Get organized with your team. Test it all before you launch a large project. The team needs to be in unison and all together. (Paraphrase) Outsourcing requires management and oversight, skilled architect at some point in the process.

@crowdconf in SF. Demo of crowdflower's new platform. Tatiana Josephy, VP product, crowdflower Although it's crowdsourcing focused, (while ziptask is skilled-outsourcing focused), technologically-speaking, we are (in some areas) not far behind. All of their dynamic task designer already existed in the ziptask backend admin system. (Dynamic creation of task forms and survey questions/user controls, etc.). Good presentation. Great seeing the results of a lot of hard working engineers.

In terms of their structure and process, they’ve done it right. They created their own, internal experts who have served as an internal consultancy to the rest of the business. Compartmentalism works well with crowdsourcing.

The panel seemed to all agree on a few anecdotal ideals: - the crowd is typically “option B” - once you get set up and effective, you can leverage that at scale forever. - if you don’t take the time to create a sophisticated model, don’t expect accurate results. - crowdsourcing is ‘one thing at a time’. As soon as you hear the phrase “and then”, you are doing it wrong. Simple user experience is the only way. - experiments really help. - breaking down (decomposition) of work is a pre-requisite of a successful task design.

Summation: the process of creating a corporate approach to outsourcing is to first delineate the flow, elaborate on data provision, train the worker specifically for the work, test workers, be ultra specific, ensure proper sourcing methods, refine the process, and the iterate again and again until it is done right.

The statistics and data continue to point to long term, sustained growth that accompanies population growth, but specific to areas with solid education rates and internet speeds.