A Crowd of Crowdsourcers – Amazon.com HQ, August 18, 2009

The folks at Amazon are hosting a Meetup 6 – 8 pm on August 18^th at their HQ up on Beacon Hill in Seattle for all those interests in the on-demand workforce. Amazon Mechanical Turk Meet-Up  They asked me to mention it on my blog, and so here it is with a simple outline of how using Smartsourcing is one of the best means to utilize Mechanical Turk.

This should be an excellent opportunity for networking and collaboration among front line innovators in digital workplace technologies. There are a host of brilliant companies utilizing the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform to complete massive quantities of work at stunningly low costs. Certainly our customers are beneficiaries of this phenomenon.

                             
A General Purpose Onramp to Mechanical Turk

                                  

What can I use it for?

• Get Email Addresses for just about everybody
• Generate Prospect Lists of company executives,…
• Conduct Surveying for feedback for websites, msg,…
• Gather Data to enhance current lists of info
• Competitive Data on prices and product offerings
• Categorization of companies, products & websites
• Writing Copy for website catalogs
• Transcribe information from PDFs or websites

What are the advantages of using Smartsheet?

1. If you can use Excel, you can use Smartsheet
2. All Mturk submissions and results are managed from within your Sheet
3. Multiple submissions per row or sheet can be active at the same time
4. Results appear real time right in your Sheet
5. You can Approve or Reject work for any row(s) as answers arrive
6. Files can be submitted and retrieved easily and remain attached to their row
7. Built in reporting tools enable data analysis, cleaning and re-submission

How it Works                                                      

You Request Work Done

1. You select any set of rows in your Sheet to be sent to the Workers
2. Include any amount of the data in each row with your work instructions
3. Identify the data fields for which you want the workers to get answers
4. Pick a price you are willing to pay for each answer and Submit

Smartsheet Sends the work to Waiting Workers

1. The work is broken into distinct pieces and sent to the workers
2. Workers perform the individual tasks and submit them
3. The results are inserted back into your Sheet
4. You accept and pay for only those results that are correct
5. Resubmit the incorrect results until you achieve your desired answers

Give Smartsourcing within Smartsheet a try prior to the Meetup. You’ll be amazed out how much you can get done without being at all technically inclined.

-Brent