Paid Crowdsourcing – The Preamble

I spend a good bit of time each week talking with business owners about paid crowdsourcing.  The variety of the work they intend for the virtual workforce never ceases to amaze me.   Initially they are attracted to Smartsheet for their needs because we enable non-technical and non-process oriented business people to successful tap the crowd.  Once they give it a quick try, they often call me to get a short tutorial on the basics of how best to approach it.  After giving this sermon over a hundred times, I thought it might be useful to write down its preamble. 

Paid crowdsourcing work falls into three primary categories and combinations of work design.

List Building – building any list from scratch is the most difficult kind of paid crowdsourcing effort.  To succeed, the workflow designs must ensure coverage, uniqueness and accuracy. Essentially, did we get all the possible members of the list, how do we ensure that workers don’t supply redundant values and how can we be sure they fit our criteria?

List Augmentation – adding information to any current list is generally pretty straightforward.  If the desired data can be described (find the - VP Sales Name, Email Address, …) and found on the web via search, then the process definition is usually less than an hour to design.  The process steps to QA the results can be more extensive, and the actual results monitoring is job specific.

Performing Creative or Judgment Tasks – asking for work that involves judgments and/or creation (e.g. creative writing, reviewing content, classifying products, image tagging …) requires very specifically designed instructions. Accurate interpretation of the intent of the work is the key to successful jobs.

The following are examples of one or more of the work types listed above:

Example	Design & Setup (hrs)	Submit & QA (hrs)	Cost   (cents)	Comments
1. Find all the blogs that focus on Climate Change	1	2	20  per blog	Self building lists
2. Find all the Wal-Mart stores in the U.S. and get their configuration details	2	2	13  per store	List Building, then Augmentation
3. Find all the plaintiff’s attorneys for every active patent lawsuit in a specific industry	3	3	15  per case	3 step process
4. Write a 500 word paragraph for a phrase, word or question	1	Volume Dependent	45 - 90  Per 500	Integrated plagiarism checking
5. Validate the current employer for a list of people	1	Volume Dependent	7  per person	Simple validation
6. Find the person and their email address for the specified title at a given list of companies	1	Volume Dependent	25  per person	Can achieve 80% accuracy
7. Find all the custom woodworkers in the U.S. and provide a link to an image of their showcased work	3	6	35  per artisan	3 step process

Many Smartsheet customers use Smartsourcing successfully without assistance. For those customers looking for help, we offer a range of services from simply answering basic questions all the way to running the entire job and process.

- Brent Frei

Comments

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