Scalable bandwidth and burstable work pools are both terms used to describe crowdsourcing. Both of these terms, however, imply that workers are anonymous ID numbers performing tasks remotely and this can be dehumanizing to them. Because of this aspect of crowdsourcing, manager interaction with crowd workers is critical and improves

After half a decade of ever-increasing crowdsourcing volume, IEI has decided to put crowd-centered technology at the center of everything we do. This doesn’t mean that we now only use external crowd workers ‑ on the contrary, our in-house teams continue to grow. It does mean that we are centralizing

Crowdsourcing can be a difficult concept to understand. The rise of “private” crowds would seem to muddy the waters even further, but this emerging phenomenon is worth a closer look. Workers participating in labor marketplaces like the Amazon Mechanical Turk or eLance are members of “public” crowds that almost anyone

It’s expensive to staff a call center with full-time, highly trained callers. There are also substantial upfront and ongoing costs for technology—routing, dialers, headsets, etc. When you add the fact that projects are often seasonal and need both lightning-fast execution and high-quality results, managing telephone-based projects can seem almost impossible.

Recently, I had the honor of delivering a guest lecture at The Information School at The University of Texas in Austin, which is proudly my alma mater. The class was Human Computation & Crowdsourcing, taught by Dr. Matt Lease. It was a sincere privilege for me and for IEI to

Getting the right workers is critically important for most managed crowdsourcing projects. Success depends on a pool of workers who understand and can do the tasks involved. So, while it’s certainly possible to open a project up to the entire crowd and then start blocking poor performers along the way,

In crowdsourcing, cheating is a common problem, and it’s a two-way street: requesters can manipulate and deceive workers just as workers can con a requester. Everyone involved needs to be creative and cautious to avoid getting taken. For example, many crowdsourcing managers use looping—asking a question multiple times to generate

Information Evolution was proud to sponsor the recent AAAI Conference on Human Computation and Crowdsourcing. Speakers and presenters from around the world brought deep academic insight into the vast AI training work cloud labor handles for digital economy leaders like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Google, and WordPress, as well as the

Often, a company has had one of two experiences with crowdsourcing on their own. They have either been frustrated by poor data generated by an unwieldy crowd or they have simply been unable to gather consistent results. When those companies go to an expert in managed crowdsourcing, they typically start