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When crowdsourcing was called telecrofting: Some origin stories

Simon TannerDigital Humanities, King’s College London

Twitter: @SimonTanner

02/05/2023 02:08 PM ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 1

Quick Case Study – telecrofting

Some fun looking at the origins of the term

Some serious points about the challenges to be addressed

Overview

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http://simon-tanner.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/when-crowdsourcing-was-called.html

Telecrofting at the Turn of the CenturyShetland Isles Museum and Archives

http://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk/

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Glass plate collection >80,000 items

Volunteer benefits are high

Shetland Isles Museum and Archiveshttp://photos.shetland-museum.org.uk/

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Volunteers trained to very high explicit skill levels

Extremely high community engagement

Task achieved but its success was defined by the community not just the museum

Project Gutenberg’s Distributed Proofreaders. Founded by Charles Franks in 2000 as an independent site to assist Project Gutenberg.

Wikipedia (launched Monday 15 January 2001) may be the greatest ever volunteer project and one that looks very much like crowdsourcing.

Don’t forget the debt of inspiration owed to the h2g2 website – a collaborative online encyclopedia project. Started by Douglas Adams in 1999 to construct in its own words, "an unconventional guide to life, the universe, and everything“ and based on his idea dating back to the 1978 radio show and books.

Some Origins of a Term

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“Commons-based peer production” - Professor Yochai Benkler Benkler, Y (2002) Coase's Penguin or Linux and The nature of the firm, Yale Law Journal 369

Information is the key object of production

“Communication and information exchange across space and time are much cheaper and more efficient than ever before”

Thus: very large numbers of people work cooperatively on the Web. Often but not exclusively without direct payment to those contributors.

Commons-based peer production is often used interchangeably with social production

Some Origins of a Term

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2001

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www.americanscientist.org/issues/pub/clickworkers-on-mars

Crowdsourcing – first useJeff Howe: “Simply defined, crowdsourcing represents the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.”

“I interpret crowdsourcing to be taking place any time a company makes a choice to employ the crowd to perform labor that could alternatively be performed by an assigned group of employees or contractors... In other words, crowdsourcing need not require an active shift from current employees (or again, contractors) to the crowd; it can start with the crowd.”

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Infinite Monkeys?

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Value Chain = Task / Utility Oriented

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Benefits = entertainment, passing the time, low level skills built

Task completion & thus crowdsourcing host

is key beneficiary

Marginal benefits but high volumes reached

Challenge – find your telecroftersIf crowdsourcing is so great why are there so few projects?

Volunteers have a much higher engagement, develop a much higher skills base and thus see more chance their lives can be changed in beneficial ways

Personalise the crowd, reach out to individuals,build genuine relationships and listen

The task is not everything – look beyond mere utility

@SimonTanner

@SimonTanner

When crowdsourcing was called telecrofting: Some origin stories

Simon TannerDigital Humanities, King’s College London

Twitter: @SimonTanner

02/05/2023 02:08 PM ENC Public Talk 19 February 2013 13