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

This tool from Crowd Computing Systems automates crowdsourcing projects. We use it at IEI to run campaigns on the Amazon Mechanical Turk, the world’s largest crowdsourcing platform. (More on WorkFusion.) We use WorkFusion for a variety of processes. It works for simple, low-end tasks such as appending URLs, email addresses,

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

It’s been 20 years since Internet search was “born,” and searching the Web is still pretty much the same as it was in 1995. Dubious sources of information are not weighted to be “worse” than accurate sources. If they’re “popular,” Google even weights them more favorably. Image and video searches

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,

As the information industry continues to evolve, we at IEI are convinced that crowdsourced updating will play an ever larger role in its underlying foundation. No longer will databases languish waiting for periodic updates. Rather, they will be constantly updated via a combination of user feedback, event-driven triggers, and crowdsourced