Notes from Crowdsourcing & UGC Mobile Tools Unconference session

Crowdsourcing & UGC mobile tools

What is crowdsourcing? Can we identify the specific CS task first and build tools around that?

Def: crowd sourcing

Correction and transcription

Contexualization

Complimenting a collection

Classification

Culturalization

Funding

 

Is it possible to create user generated tools that can be repurposed?

Or do you need context and targets?

Yes - open exhibit, source forge, bootcamp, etc

Open exhibit more museum specific

• Johan Ooman: 6 types http://bit.ly/h9L8vS (NYPL came up with same categories in their own independent exercise!):

1. correction & transcription
2. contextualization, e.g. add to a wiki, tell stories
3. complementing the collection, eg adding scans to it
4. classification, tagging
5. co-curation: public curates items from the collection
6. crowdfunding

• Crowdsourcing can play a role in many of stages of project lifecycle

Questions for our agenda

• What are good ways to exhibit/share content?
• Content and projects that would be interesting for crowdsourcing

 

• Museums often don’t work together – also need to learn from how other organizations are working; see for example WildLab app: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/wildlab-bird/id3699...

 

• User motivation: the key to getting useful crowdsourced info from people is communicating back to them that what they are doing is valuable: a social rather than technical engineering problem. Will take more resources to staff a crowdsourcing project than build it technically – how does this scale? How can the crowd help with moderation?
• Rewards: a lot of people see value in just being part of a project they care about; how do you create a feedback system so you don’t have to vet everything
• Wikipedia: credits people
• Clay Shirky: Cognitive Surplus book, looks at motivation factors; sharing and generosity as main drivers for drawing in people;
• Museum invites in most frequent retweeters for special, behind-the-scenes tours
• Don’t discount emotional connection of people to the institution
• Social engineering: a lot of getting participation is about how you ask – not “can you give us 5 min to fill in the survey” but explain why their clicking twice will make a real difference to the organization
• Infomaki tool from NYPL is a really elegant example of kindly asking people to answer simple questions. “Do you have time to answer 1 question?” is opener, but most people answer 12; IMA uses it for website testing
• Instead of getting people to come to our platform, how can we leverage facebook, flickr etc. – existing platforms – so people do what we want them to do on their own turf?
• Some people want to be really involved, others just want to dabble – both are ok, how do we recognize/reward them? This is common across humanities. How can we motivate dabblers? Use needs to be very easy; speaks to using existing, known platforms, integrating into people’s current behavior/habits.

 

• Intersection between citizen science and humanities/arts: where is the overlap, what can we learn from each other?
• Easier to do crowdsourcing in sciences because there are defined process, not so in humanities/arts

 

• How do you get your directors involved and onboard with the idea of working with the crowd? To value user-generated content

 

What existing tools can we reuse that already exist?

Is it possible to build generic, reusable UGC tools?

• Yes, personas will have common elements
• There are existing tools, eg Google groups; there are other examples of tools used in multiple contexts; see also SourceForge…
• Open Exhibits is another example: opensource code & modules for museums, more specific to museum needs than Source Forge
• “Crowdsourcing” is on its way to being cliché before the word has had time to mean a specific thing; there is no one meaning for the word; for some tasks there may be reusable tools, but not all; how can we determine what level of task we’re talking about? Definable in a small chunk – a 10 second task – and does the user get something out of it, understand what they’re doing

 

Targeted vs general

Flickr, YouTube, blogs, survey/polling sites, wiki, source forge, open source, boot camp, census, dictionary, red laser

 

EXISTING PLATFORMS

galaxy zoo - transcribing old navy weather records

Google maps

Broadcastr

Woices

Roundware - presents recordings as a collage instead of linear presentation of audio recording. Customizable parameters.

Audio Boo, UK soundmaps

Sound cloud

Epicollect

Gogogo - community collection online

Smithsonian and Hirschhorn

• Creat 3d models from crowd images
• Updating sculpture db through mobile application

 

Smithsonian Archive - asks a specific group to help identify specific works in the archive.

What's a self sustaining way of rewarding or motivating people to contribute? Wikipedia

-Motivation for Contributing

Sharing and generosity

Connection to institution

Infomaki from nypl - kind way to ask simple question

NY museum - posts photos that can't identify on Facebook

Wild lab app for bird watching

What do you want

Engagement pyramid - include options for people who want to dip vs dive deep

Project bud burst - report on when people see blooms

Show constraint in what you're asking your crowd

Show how contribution is important

What can we learn from the development department? Micro donations, micro volunteering

Remind user of their accomplishments (rewards, status)

Motivation can intrinsic or extrinsic - micro task

YouTube + Guggenheim : live feed event to present videos that were selected. Sown in theatre for four days. YouTube channel but people wanted to come to space to see them. Had celebrated curators. Presenting at Museum Next

Examples of great crowdsourcing projects:

• Tag gardening to clean up messy user-generated data
• Smithsonian Archive of famous people in science: crowd cleans up Institution’s data, fills in gaps. Why do people do it? Interested in topic, reached out to dedicated existing Flickr Commons fan group; report results and profile star contributors
• Museum of City of New York’s FB page, mystery image project; Museum truly doesn’t know what they are; now trying to do this on a larger scale and build API to reingest this info into their db – possibly works because the interaction is in a place where people already are
• Project Budburst, gets people to report on when their flowers are blooming etc.
• GalaxyZoo Old Weather Project: incredibly easy-to-use transcription tool
• Broadcastr platform, tags audio file at geolocation; see also Woices, Roundware, AudioBoo
• Scapes: questions are the motivator; 6 months, 800 recordings, no take-downs due to inappropriate content; also important is how the content is presented back to people, in a collage re-presentation of the comments & voices – designer can control parameters of how long messages are played before fading out, how often repeated, how many voices at once – typically Halsey chooses 2 voices, puts them in an asynchronous conversation about having visited the same place at the same time; music changes based on location as well, makes the experience continuous
• Broadcastr: plays recordings within a given radius nearby, also based on a ranking system – Ed Rodley’s friend works there and is happy to talk with folks!
• British Library has a collaboration with AudioBoo, paying £5,000
• Soundcloud: iPhone app that is adding geotagging as new feature
• Epicollect app: allows you to add images, geotags, and classify it with tick boxes; still very rough but intriguing;
• Europeana is doing a large-scale content-gathering campaign around WWII using Oxfor University platform “go-go-go” – opensource
• History Pin: closed system, collaborating with NY City Museum – a way for people to comment on and contribute pictures; log in using google account
• V&A’s system to crowdsource the best photos of objects; still working on algorithm to decide how an image gets selected, too many variables
• IMA project
• Design patterns for Crowdsourcing!! Can we crowdsource this book?? See Floss Manuals; best practice from storytelling, marketing, outreach, micro-volunteering
• BeExtra.org microvolunteering; Mechanical Turk model
• Microtask.com in Finland
• Ask your future self a question (Theater project) – way to redirect the conversation to people in the audience, rather than to the actors
• Center for Creative Generations, 12 monitors, visitors contribute to exhibition on encountering space, submit their photos of Texas space
• YouTube Play – people submitted work to Guggenheim for curators to look at; exhibition of this video and online in a YouTube Channel, 23million views; will present results at MuseumNext – will be livecast
• IDEAS FOR CROWD SOURCING
• IMA - First Impressions - what's the first thing that catches their eye when they look at an image. Curator used information to write about piece singling out areas that were not mentioned.

 

Is there any point thinking of mobile UGC tools independent of fixed web/large screen?