Over the last few months, I have been spending more and more time in the US, doing my best to soak up the famous American culture (while rushing between meetings).

Of course, regardless of what country you live in, one event which you cannot escape is the Super Bowl: that special time of year, when the world comes together to ignore America’s favorite sport. This year we in the crowdsourcing industry were forced to pay attention (but, mercifully, not to the game itself): amongst the usual 60 minutes of incomprehensible rhinoceros-ballet scattered over a four hour broadcast, some 111 million American households were treated to the best the ad industry has to offer. On display this year, according to several delirious press releases, were a selection of the world’s first crowdsourced adverts.

But before we get all excited about our industry’s move into the mainstream, let’s have a look at what actually happened (I promise I don’t mean in the actual football). Several sponsors, including Doritos and Chevrolet, held online ‘crowdsourcing’ contests giving entrants the chance to see their home-made ads in the coveted half-time slot, rubbing shoulders with Clint Eastwood (selling cars in an ultra-patriotic Chrysler ad ), Matthew Broderick (selling cars by squeezing out the last drops of nostalgia from his cheeky Ferris Bueller grin), and Kim Kardashian (doing something that I’m not going to bother dignifying with a link).

Out of thousands of entries, each company picked one lucky winner to receive prizes of up to $30,000. Doritos featured a man being bribed with tortilla chips to keep quiet about the activities of his murderous dog, Chevrolet fared less well with a predictable graduation day mix-up, while yoghurt maker Dannon’s choice faced multiple accusations of plagiarism with its suspiciously familiar tale of greed triumphing over romance set to a suspiciously familiar musical accompaniment.

The crowd goes wild?

While in some ways it is nice for the crowdsourcing industry to get this sort of attention, the focus on competitive crowdsourcing distracts from the unique opportunities that the crowd can offer.

As we have discussed before, competitive crowdsourcing, which only ends up using a single participant’s work, is the least effective form of crowdsourcing. Crowds are most productive when they work together, as we’ve seen with our experience at Digitalkoot, where thousands of small contributions added up to a huge achievement. In competitive crowdsourcing projects, most of the work done is wasted. There is no real co-operation (unless you consider plagiarism a form of assistance). Finally, none of the really exciting, juicy bits of crowdsourcing theory, like collective reasoning, can come into play.

In some ways, this comes back to the issue of the vague terminology that surrounds a lot of crowd-based enterprises, and the multiple models that are described by the word ‘crowdsourcing.’ The Super Bowl ads demonstrate on a grand scale why it is important for the different parts of the crowdsourcing industry to differentiate themselves from what is fast becoming a meaningless buzzword.

Crowded house of representatives

Thankfully, while the NFL sponsors have been parroting the term, crowdsourcing has quietly been getting on with the business of revolutionizing the world. The US Congress has unveiled a draft form of its new Online Protection & Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act, a more considered alternative to the controversial SOPA and PIPA bills. It was opened to the crowd for amendment, and the input of some 150 users resulted in six alterations to the bill. This comes right after new research revealed that crowdsourced businesses may have an even brighter future than everyone (except us, of course) predicted.

Away from the sideshow of the Super Bowl ‘crowdsourcing’ experiment, with its alarmingly sexist corn chip commercials and accusations of plagiarism, the crowdsourcing model continues to demonstrate its value in both the public and private spheres. The best we can do is to explore the possibilities of the crowd to the full, and try and take this kind of half-baked imitation as a compliment.

People are strange. We look for faces and animals in clouds, we spot Michael Jackson in a greasy roasting dish, and we pay tens of thousands of dollars for pieces of toast that resemble the Virgin Mary (personally, I think it looks more like Michael Jackson, but I admit that I am not a qualified toast inspector).

This compulsion to find meaningful images in random information is known as Pareidolia. Though it may seem like a useless and potentially dangerous handicap to our thinking, in fact Pareidolia is a key part of one of humanity’s most useful abilities: pattern recognition.

Pattern recognition is the key to some of our greatest achievements as a species, from language and music to Where’s Wally. Now it’s becoming even more important, as it becomes clear just how advanced our ability is, and how difficult it is to create software that can emulate it. This, of course, is where human computing and Microtask enters the picture.

Rise of the human machines

The current boom in human computing, signaled by Microtask’s recent success at the Red Herring awards, puts pattern recognition at the frontier of the tech industry. I’ve written in the past about the limits of artificial intelligence and the ongoing war between human and machine translators (spoiler alert: humans are still winning, but only just). This, along with the success of Digitalkoot in correcting machine recognition errors, shows just how far computerized pattern recognition has to go before it can rival the average human brain.

But as well as letting us prove our mastery over the machines by thrashing computers in translation races (which, incidentally, may be a bad idea if you take the threat of a robot uprising seriously), crowdsourced data processing projects are raising exciting questions about how powerful our pattern recognition powers become when we work together as a crowd.

All they were saying, was give Peas a chance

We’ve mentioned the Galaxy Zoo project before, and its ongoing mission to classify hundreds of thousands of images of galaxies with the help of a crowd of volunteers. But an unexpected discovery on the Galaxy Zoo forum provides a great example of what can happen when a crowd of people combine their pattern recognition skills. Members reported strange green blobs resembling peas, floating in the corners of the images, and a whimsical thread called “Give Peas A Chance” snowballed into a major astronomical discovery.

At first the peas were assumed to be insignificant errors in the images, but after a campaign on the Galaxy Zoo forum put pressure on the supervising astronomers, investigation revealed them to be a previously unknown type of compact galaxy. Astronomers gave the crowd credit for the discovery and showed their gratitude by officially naming these mysterious galaxies ‘Peas’.

The Galaxy Zoo crowd’s ability to notice unexpected anomalies shows where human pattern recognition is supreme. A computer would not have noticed the peas, as they were not part of the focal problem. However, sadly, for every Space Pea there is a slice of Holy Toast, and human pattern recognition’s strength (the ability to detect patterns and deduce meaning) is also its weakness (it can lead to people detecting patterns in meaningless noise).

This is where the power of the crowd can make a difference. Noticing the peas was only the first step: The Galaxy Zoo forum provided a venue for discussion which allowed the wisdom of crowds to get to work. We are used to seeing projects use the crowd to verify results like we do at Microtask. But the Galaxy Zoo discovery shows the potential of human computing to deal with more complex problems. My guess is that in 2012 we will start to discover just how much we can achieve with our powers combined.

Ever since he exploded onto our screens as the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters, it was clear (at least to 8 year olds like me) that Newt Gingrich would one day go places.

True to my (utterly fictitious) predictions, if you read the news at the moment there is no escaping him and his good friend Mitt Romney. This is important for us, because if Newt is successful, crowdsourcing may soon be a matter of National Security: the new President’s life may just depend on it.

The reason for this is that the White House is not the only place Newt has his eye on. In January Mr. Gingrich said that he would, if elected, create a base on the moon by 2020. Now, I don’t know if Newt has seen the trailers for Apollo 18, but if he has he will know that before he goes anywhere near the moon, he should make sure there are no aliens up there, lurking in the shadows of a crater, waiting to attack him.

Newtralizing alien threats
Fortunately for Newt, a plan has been developed by a couple of scientists over at Arizona State University. Paul Davies and Robert Wagner put forward a paper last year suggesting the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life (SETI) program should be supplemented by scanning the surface of the moon for signs of visitors from another planet. The idea is that any traces left by aliens making a pit stop on the lunar surface would be preserved by the moon’s minimal atmosphere.

The pair proposed that images taken by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) could be categorized by image scanning algorithms then distributed over the internet for a crowd of enthusiasts to look at. Any suspicious objects found this way could then be sent on to experts for further analysis.

The LRO has already mapped about 5.7 million km². Unfortunately the images have a rather distant maximum resolution of half a meter per pixel, so finding anything smaller than a campaign bus is going to be quite tough.

This got me thinking about another comment Newt has recently made, about how he would like to mine the moon after the base is established. You see, while the photos may not be detailed enough to make out any spaceship keys or baseball caps that aliens accidentally dropped, what they might reveal is lucrative looking mineral deposits.

Not only might such mineral discoveries fund Davies’ and Wagner’s crowdsourcing idea and the eventual cost of the moon base, it may even help Newt boost his campaign fund, which could make all the difference when up against the deep pockets of Mitt Romney.

With its beautiful crumbling buildings and vintage motor cars, spicy culture and rich history, few countries excite the imagination like Cuba.

Over the Christmas break I visited this tiny island that occupies such a large place in world culture and history. Explaining the country of Castro is probably impossible, but triumphant Socialism or the white sandy beaches of Varadero are far from the reality. Day-by-day Cuba revealed itself exciting, surprising and often disappointing.

Paper to the people
One thing that struck me – aside form the complete lack of consumer choice – was the amount of bureaucracy involved in… pretty much everything, from getting a seat on a bus to accessing the internet.

As a socialist country Cuba is buried in paperwork (which may explain the shortage of toilet paper); what makes it crazy is that all that work is mostly done in vain.

As you might have heard, Cuba is one of those places where the use of the web is highly regulated. Only few selected people can obtain a connection (mostly those hosting tourists), and prices are so prohibitive that even without explicit restrictions, very few locals could afford one. We are talking prices in the order of 5 times the average monthly salary for an evening-only dial-up connection, so not exactly 100MB-per-second optic fiber.

What’s more interesting is that not even official or state-run activities seem to use any kind of intranet to coordinate their revolutionary efforts. Everything is scribbled on little pieces of paper that end up in a closet somewhere, forever forgotten. In the whole island I couldn’t find evidence of a single database where data could be cross-referenced. For a tourist, this means that you don’t know if the bus coming in 2 hours will have a free seat: you just wait and see. For Cubans, it probably means a life of unnecessary grind against an unfriendly and highly inefficient bureaucracy.

Hasta la crowd-victoria
Add these observations to the incredibly high unemployment rate among all age groups, I came to two conclusions. First: aside from the obvious goal of granting freedom of speech to all their citizens, Cuba needs reliable, fast and affordable internet connections at least as a way to provide its citizens with work. Second: crowdsourcing could play a big part in this process.

Cuba has a high level of education, so transcriptions from paper to digital formats could be a bit of a waste of potential in this specific case. But when the choice is between doing that and hanging around your front door from dusk till dawn, the decision seems easy. The concepts of crowd labor and microwork are wide enough to appeal to people of all ages and educational backgrounds.

Although Cuba is a fascinating country to visit, actually living there probably isn’t. Ordinary Cubans are crying out for the opportunities most of the world takes for granted. With some decent internet access, crowdsourcing could help kickstart this process (there is definitely no shortage of paper forms that need transcribing). It could be the start of a much needed second revolution.

Every country in the world has probably benefited in some way from the unprecedented access to knowledge and services brought about by the digital revolution. But producing the knowledge banks and services has so far been a predominately rich-country business. The world’s poorest countries have generally not been able to participate in the production side of the digital economy and share in its rewards. This is changing, however, and an initiative lead by the World Bank’s infoDev program is helping to shape the change.

As the digital economy grows, it increasingly gives rise to work that is “born digital” – that is, new work that arises out of the possibilities and needs of the digital world. This phenomenon is distinct from how conventional jobs are increasingly digitized in the sense of making heavy use of information and communication technologies. Most born-digital work represents new work that doesn’t directly compete with old occupations.

For example, hundreds of thousands of people around the world earn income from tasks like moderating images posted by users to an online community, categorizing products on an e-commerce site, and transcribing digital video clips to make them more searchable. Because these tasks are completely digital, they can be physically carried out anywhere where a computer can be connected to the Internet.

A recent trend is that demand for such digital blue-collar work is satisfied through so-called “crowdsourcing” and “microsourcing” models. This means that instead of a company hiring a staffer or a contractor to carry out a job, the job is broken down into individual tasks and distributed to a large pool of workers over a digital network.

For example, many companies post their tasks on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), a digital labor marketplace. At any given time AMT carries around 200,000 microtasks, each worth from a few cents to several dollars. Anyone wishing to earn this money can simply point their web browser to AMT and follow the instructions. Microwork is inclusive in that gender, disability and other personal characteristics do not play a role in selection on digital labor marketplaces.

The World Bank’s mission is to reduce poverty in the world, and its infoDev program got interested in the potential of digital microwork to provide employment to poor people in developing countries. In 2010, I was commissioned by infoDev to co-author a report to assess this and related issues, titled Knowledge Map of the Virtual Economy.

According to the report, microwork has several features that make it particularly accessible to people in developing countries. Most tasks require few skills or qualifications, as they rely on the fact that humans are inherently better than computers at tasks like image recognition and natural language processing. Microwork is relatively disintermediated, meaning that it is not necessary to find employment at a local business process outsourcing company to tap into the market – a web browser is enough. Low labor costs moreover give a competitive advantage to workers from developing countries.

Many microworkers are indeed located in the developing world. According to one survey, 34 percent of workers on AMT are from India. Two other microwork distributors, Samasource and MobileWorks, have workers in countries such as Kenya, Pakistan and the Philippines. Workers access the tasks from computers in Internet cafés and offices, and earn income in the form of cash, bank deposits and gift cards. In these low- to medium-developed countries, digital microwork seems to be having a real economic impact.

Least-developed countries would have the most to gain from tapping into this source of digital export income. However, their ability to do so is limited by their digital infrastructure: the availability of computers and Internet cafés from which to access digital labor markets.
But even the most underprivileged people in the world increasingly have access to mobile phones. There are over 5 billion mobile phone subscriptions in the world, and over half a billion in India alone. In 2011, mobile phone penetration reached almost 80 percent in the developing world. In the near future, typical mobile phones in the developing world will start to resemble personal computers in terms of features and Internet connectivity.

m2Work is an online challenge conducted by infoDev and IdeasProject, with funding and support from UKaid and the Government of Finland. The aim of the challenge is to identify problems and needs that could be addressed by tapping into microworkers who use mobile phones – enabling the bottom of the economic pyramid to access the digital economy, and enabling the rest of the world to benefit from their intelligence.

Challenge participants are asked to come up with ideas for mobile phone applications that link problems that could be tackled by microwork with microworkers located in the developing world. The best ideas are awarded cash prizes of up to $20,000 and supported in various ways with a view towards their eventual realization as, for example, startup companies. The slogan of the challenge is, “From millions of tasks to thousands of jobs”.

What would you do with a mobile workforce of millions? Submit your idea for a chance to make it reality.

First they lend too much, cause a financial meltdown and need bailing out. Now they don’t lend enough (unless share-options and fat bonuses count as lending). As any former Wall St inhabitant, election-year politician or self-respecting Hollywood celebrity will tell you: banks are pure evil.

Personally, I quite like the banking system as a whole. Swiping a little plastic card in exchange for a pile of food is my favorite magic trick. Still, there’s no doubt the current system could be improved. And, you guessed it, crowdsourcing may be able to help, by offering an alternative way for people to borrow and lend money.

Models for (spare) change
A variety of crowd-based alternatives now provide ways for people to lend money to each other for profit, sidestepping the banks. As banks continue to clamp down on lending, these companies are seeing enormous growth.

The exchange begins with borrowers proposing an amount they want to borrow. Then, much like crowdfunding, lenders contribute to the loan until it reaches its goal and the borrower gets their money. Some companies like RateSetter automatically link lenders and borrowers by the rates they want. Others like Funding Circle, which specializes in funding for small businesses, allow lenders greater control.

Despite their growth, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending only accounts for around $270 million of lending in the US. Such a measly amount is nowhere near sufficient to meet demand caused by banks’ current unwillingness to lend.

The reasons for the small numbers (when did 270 million become a small number?) are numerous. There’s understandable reluctance from customers to manage their own lending. Crowdbanking (or maybe “distributed lending” anyone?) must also overcome unfriendly regulation, vested interests and an entrenched banking system that we still depend on even if it does go a little crazy now and then.

Law of the lever(age)
Ultimately, traditional banking has a key advantage over distributed lending: leverage. Because of its P2P model, the distributed lenders only lend as much money as their members put in. Corporations and banks can leverage capital to effectively create money out of thin air. Of course, this may be a good thing: the absence of leverage means P2P lenders can’t inflate themselves into oblivion and cause economic meltdowns.

So, are we on the cusp of a banking revolution, or is it just a flash in the pan? Assuming the hurdles mentioned above can be overcome, the question, I think, will come down to convenience and reliability. If P2P lending and borrowing is more economic than using a bank, and becomes as easy as bidding on eBay, why wouldn’t it catch on? With Google and Facebook already tinkering about with transaction services and even their own currencies, the stage is set for the shift in thinking that may enable this change. And we know that big things can happen when people tap the power of the crowd.

Of course, if it all collapses, we can always fall back on a system of barter. Which will be good for plumbers and carpenters, but not so good for us at Microtask (you try bartering microtasks in exchange for a cheeseburger at 1am).

Take the following ingredients:

. Two award-winning cookery writers.
. One eager food-loving crowd.
. A sprinkling of game mechanics.

Mix them all together and what do get? Answer: Food52. Founded in 2009 by New York Times journalists Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs, the site is described as a “social hub for people who love to cook”. As well as debating burning culinary questions (just how do you make a vegan omelet?), Food52 runs regular crowdsourced recipe contests. Members of the community submit their finest gourmet creations, which are tested and voted for by the crowd. Winning recipes are awarded prizes and eventually published.

Aside from the crowdsourcing element, what struck me most about Food52 is how good the site looks. Food-wise Amanda and Merrill may be “all about simplicity”, but there’s nothing homemade about their presentation. Winning crowdsourced recipes are accompanied by mouth-watering professional photos (warning: this is not a site for dieters). No doubt this acts as a participation incentive: “enter our contest and we’ll make your Grandma’s cookies look like something out of a glossy magazine”.

Food52: the secret’s in the (crowd)source

As they explain in this video, when it comes to crowdsourcing, Amanda and Merrill are practical, rather than idealistic: “it’s a great way to get lots of content but it’s completely useless unless you can curate and filter it”. This is a fair point, but I think too much top-down control can also disengage users. If every cupcake recipe is rigorously monitored and filtered, the Food52 community may (understandably) start to feel the site doesn’t “belong” to them.

Food52 clearly has big ambitions. This year the company began a (no doubt very lucrative) partnership with US health food giant Whole Foods. They have also just launched a Holiday Cookbook iPad app. It’s still early days but, for now, Food52 seems to have cornered the market in “cooking social”.

Charles Darwin once wrote that “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Despite how far society has progressed since this was written, it seems as relevant now as it ever was. Whether it’s refusing to stop and ask for directions because we’re sure we know the right way (only to find ourselves lost in the wilderness), or setting the treadmill too fast and ending up in a spluttering heap on the gym floor, most of us can relate to its sentiment.

But misplaced confidence can go beyond slapstick, with devastating consequences. The Deepwater Horizon oil spill and the continued resistance to tackling climate change are arguably two such examples.

Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing
But what makes us overconfident in our judgments? And what keeps those with valuable knowledge in the background? Research from social psychologists Justin Kruger and David Dunning may explain why we get it wrong so often.

Their experiments revealed that people generally overestimate their ability in areas they understand poorly, and underestimate their ability where their understanding is good. This is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and is one of many cognitive biases that affect us all.

Only the lonely
In a world where we’re told to think big and believe in ourselves, can we avoid becoming victims of our own accidental arrogance? The Dunning-Kruger Effect has one important limit: it only applies to individuals (except me, of course). This is where the crowd may offer a way to keep our feet on the ground.

Here at Microtask we’ve seen that by having multiple members of the crowd complete the same task we can achieve far better accuracy than by relying on individual judgment. But the potential of the crowd may take us much further.

Research into collective reasoning focuses on the concept of the wise crowd, a group which mixes experts and amateurs. In a wise crowd, laypeople are free to ask difficult questions and offer unorthodox solutions that experts may not consider. In turn, the experts are required to explain their observations and conclusions, and to be transparent in their reasoning.

United we stand
The power of the wise crowd depends on its diversity. By replacing the traditional team of experts, each with their own specialist area (like the one that produced the Deepwater Horizon risk assessment), with a wise crowd, it may be possible to sidestep the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Members of the crowd are encouraged to think for themselves and to be skeptical of bold claims. The crowd prioritizes clarity and results rather than blind confidence.

The crowd’s potential for new, better forms of reasoning raises exciting possibilities for the future, but how far could it go? Could crowd power show us the way to a more rational form of society? The Arab Spring has shown the power of the crowd to overthrow dictatorial regimes but so far most attempts at using crowdsourcing to design better alternatives have met with limited success (Iceland’s constitution being one of a few exceptions).

Despite such setbacks, as we learn to use crowdsourcing more effectively, I am certain that it will solve all the world’s problems caused by overconfidence. Absolutely, 100% certain.

As if things weren’t already hard enough for them, crooked bankers , deposed dictators and international super villains have one more thing to worry about. Having spent their last hours of freedom shredding incriminating evidence into neat strips, they might have thought they could get away with their misdeeds. It turns out however that those shredded documents might not be as unreadable as they thought.

Our old friends at DARPA (or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency if you have the time) decided that there might be something worth reading on those strips. They wanted to create software that could identify scanned strips and piece them together as quickly as possible.

Money to learn
DARPA’s annual budget is $3.2 billion. They could have hired a crack team of programmers without making a scratch on that figure. But even the best programmers in the world are only going to come up with one solution at a time. Knowing that crowdsourcing would provide a variety of possible solutions, DARPA decided to establish a crowdsourced competition.

With a first prize of $50,000 (much cheaper than hiring programmers) the “Shredder Challenge” had five challenges of increasing difficulty. In a clever bit of gamification, each document consisted of a puzzle that could only be solved when the document had been stitched back together. Entrants won the prize by being the first to submit all the correct puzzle answers.

“All your shreds are belong to U.S.” was the meme themed team that got their entries in ahead of everyone else and a full two days before the deadline. The team of only three San Francisco based programmers had just 35 days to complete the task. They spent 600 man-hours spent building the algorithms which made suggestions of shreds that might fit together.

Suspicious finds
DARPA claims they came up with the Shredder Challenge for soldiers to use in the battlefield (presumably for when they find that bunker full of shredded MapQuest directions to the W.M.Ds) and also uncover potential vulnerabilities in U.S. Government document disposal practices. Conspiracy theorists will surely claim it’s only a matter of time before the software is turned on us ordinary decent folk with nothing to hide (except maybe some irregular tax returns).

Should we throw out our shredders then? Well there is no news of a slump in shredder sales. The thing is, even if the software was cheap and freely available someone still has to get hold of the paper shreds, laboriously scan them all, then reassemble them after the software has worked its magic. You would have to have something pretty important in those shreds (pirate treasure maps?) for someone to go to all that trouble.

DARPA’s intentions seem pretty straight forward. In fact for a government agency tasked with “preventing and creating strategic surprise” they are very open about many of their projects. It’s difficult to make use of crowdsourcing without the crowd having some idea of what you are doing, which is great for the rest of us because every now and then we find out about a tantalizing DARPA project.

As we have seen before in this blog DARPA has certainly caught the crowdsourcing bug, and is well positioned to experiment with different crowdsourcing models. This is great for the industry as a whole. With DARPA blazing a crowdsourced trail, other organizations that were unsure about how to use crowdsourcing may find a DARPA method that suits their needs.

At this time of year, it often seems like people in the media industry are still too full/hungover from Christmas and New Year’s over-indulgence to do any real work. Filling the newspapers are either stories remembering the year just ended, or nostalgic human-interest stories.

Seeing as we have already reflected on 2011, we decided it was a good time to talk about something that few, if anyone, will ever be able to remember again: the First World War (one of the last surviving veterans, Englishman Claude Choules, died recently, aged 110). So yes, this is our nostalgic post.

Of course, thanks to the wonders of the written word, thousands of first-hand accounts of the war will outlive those who wrote them. Yet, as we approach the centenary of the outbreak of fighting, many of these records themselves are at risk of being lost. Those that do survive are often either gathering dust in private homes around Europe, or too delicate to allow the general public to freely access them.

One Europe, working together
With this in mind (and to show that European collaboration is not limited to arguing over government debt), Europeana – Europe’s digital archive, library and museum – aims to make over 400,000 key documents and images from World War I freely available online (with help from libraries and partners across Europe). This will give people everywhere unprecedented access to first-hand information from both sides of the conflict.

Such a project is close to the heart of the people (and moles) here at Microtask. Many of the documents will be selected from archives from the partner libraries, but the public can also contribute to the project by submitting scanned copies of their letters, diaries, photos and other memorabilia from the war (only German-related material is being collected currently).

Looking through the material gathered from the public so far (here by the University of Oxford and here by the German National Library), makes you feel like you have stumbled across photos buried in your grandfather’s basement.

This feeling is partly because the material is so personal and authentic. But it is also partly because much of the text in the letters and diaries has not been transcribed into digital text, so can only be read in its original handwritten form. Although this adds to the feeling of nostalgia, it also means that such text is not searchable. This is fine when you are rummaging through a shoebox of letters, but it becomes a bit of an issue when you’re talking about 400,000 documents (presumably many of these will be fully digitized, but based on the archives available so far, I’m guessing a great deal will not).

By the people, for the people
The issue is, I assume, one of cost. Accurately digitizing massive collections of records takes a huge amount of time and money if you have to pay people to do it. As we all know only too well, in the Europe of 2012 neither of these commodities is in abundant supply.

What I would like to see is greater reliance on the public for this huge task. As Digitalkoot has shown, when it comes to preserving the past, there are thousands of people out there willing to help for free. All they need to get going is a call to action and a clever platform to facilitate their contributions (and maybe a little help from some self-sacrificial moles).

In the near future, as governments cut spending and crowdsourcing continues to develop, we expect to see much more crowd participation in these sorts of projects. In fact, we expect to be running some of them.

Looking back, this year seems set to enter the history books as a year of upheaval: from natural disasters such as the Japanese tsunami, to the economic turmoil in the EU and US, to the more positive chaos in the Middle East.

Amidst the booming tech industry, we at Microtask have often felt insulated from this turbulence. But mostly, we have felt like we were right there, in the thick of it: 2011 was the year that the power of the online crowd shook the world (almost a year after we had discussed how crowdsourcing and information sharing platforms were being used to promote democratic change in Tunisia and Egypt).

Just as crowdsourcing was going global, so were we. This year we established our HQ of sales and marketing operations in Atlanta, with regional sales offices on both coasts. To help us conquer America, we have recruited a range of the best and brightest talent the US has to offer (see our newsletter for more info on this).

A DISH of Red Herring and a Grammy?
Just as exciting, in just the last few days Red Herring announced that Microtask has won its Global Top 100 award. We have big shoes to fill: other winners include Google, Skype, Baidu, Salesforce, YouTube and eBay.

We are equally proud of the success of Digitalkoot, our joint project with the National Library of Finland. To date almost 100,000 volunteers have donated over 280,000 minutes of time and completed nearly 6 million tasks. With their help (yes, and some assistance from a lot of moles) we were a finalist in the DISH (Digital Strategies for Heritage) and Mindtrek Launchpad awards.

Last, and certainly least, 2011 was the year that the (until recently) rather geeky management team at Microtask finally won serious gangsta street cred, by releasing our very own (crowdsourced) animated rap song. We are still waiting to hear about our Grammy nomination.

Back, to the future
From this vantage point, riding the wave of history, it is hard not to be positive about 2012 (assuming the world doesn’t end). We are, of course, expecting more exciting developments in the crowdsourcing industry, and here at Microtask.

But for now, we are happy to reflect on what has been a hectic, but immensely rewarding year. To the 100,000 people who gave their time for our groundbreaking Digitalkoot project, and helped preserve significant amounts of Finnish history: we salute you. 2011 we dedicate to you.

As you are all no doubt well aware, in the weeks leading up to Christmas, every song on the radio, every elevator conversation and every piece of advertising stuffed into our mailboxes must be Christmas-themed. It’s enough to ruin what should be a fun time of year. Which is why this blog post is definitely, absolutely not going to be about Christmas.

Ok, I lied. This is all about Christmas. But don’t worry, it won’t be one of those sickeningly sentimental posts, cynically exploiting the Christmas spirit to avoid doing proper research and hard-thinking.* I have real Christmas-related, crowdsourced news to report.

Crowdsourcing is all around me, and so the feeling grows
As you may recall, a year ago we wrote about how crowdsourcing was now (then) so mainstream, that you could take care of all your Christmas essentials using only crowdsourcing companies (assuming you were happy to eat only donuts and pizza, and never see the people you gave gifts to again).

One year on, and crowdsourcing seems to be truly mainstream. Now googling “crowdsource Christmas” returns multiple examples of people using the crowd to help them choose Christmas cards and presents, where to go on holiday and which bicycles are safe to buy your kids. To top it off, there is even a nauseating crowdsourced Christmas song, to compete with the Christmas song from Love Actually for best-worst Christmas song.

The problem I have with this list is that, aside from the song, all the “crowdsourcing” on it is really just using the internet to canvass peoples’ opinions. Yes, the crowdsourcing industry has grown hugely in the last couple of years, but this growth is almost becoming overshadowed by the term itself, which is now a buzzword that people apply to almost anything involving group participation.

OK, it’s Christmas, so I won’t complain too much about an issue which I have already said a fair bit about. All I ask for Christmas, is this:

Dear Santa: in 2012 may the crowdsourcing industry and public in general please agree on more precise terminology for crowdsourcing/widesourcing/distributed labor etc, before all of us become tarnished by bad Christmas songs and lazy blog posts. If you grant me this one request, I promise I won’t exploit Christmas in a blog post this time next year.*

*OK, these are also lies. Don’t tell Santa.

It’s official: Microtask won Red Herring’s Global 100 award for 2011. We now join the ranks of companies like Google, Skype, Baidu, Salesforce.com, YouTube, eBay and many others who won this award and went on to change the way we live and work. Good Karma.

Here’s the proof:

As regular readers of this blog will know, we here at Microtask are pretty enthusiastic when it comes to crowdsourcing initiatives that have the power to make the world a better place.

This time last year, we wrote a blog about some crowdsourcing projects designed to improve our understanding of environmental issues, including climate change. Basically, while there were some good projects, we felt that the crowd had a lot more to offer. One year later, has much changed?

I can feel it coming, in the air tonight
If you’re a user of crowdsourcing weather apps Weathermob or Weddar you’ll know that the weather in the northern hemisphere has been a little weird lately.

These location-based apps basically allow people to report on their local weather conditions (a service which is incredibly useful for those people out there who really want to know what the weather outside is like, but can’t be bothered looking out the window). Needless to say, although complaining about the weather is fun, it’s hard to imagine a more pointless use of crowd-power.

Time for a cool change?
Thankfully, the Guardian has come up with something similar, but potentially a lot more useful. It has asked people to report anything unusual about the environment in their area. From spring Coral Bells flowering in Dorset in the UK, to mosquitoes outstaying their welcome (is a mosquito ever welcome?) in Berlin, the results were compiled to create an interactive map of meteorological weirdness.

Of course the Guardian’s research has its shortcomings too. Claims can’t be verified, meaning hoaxsters (or those people who can’t be bothered looking out the window) could potentially skew the data. But if we assume that no one wants to sabotage the experiment with false sightings of wild primroses (which seems unlikely), the information collected should create a useful record for climate scientists. It won’t save the world, but it’s a step in the right direction.

Our (always biased) view is that much like the sun’s rays and the force of the wind, the power of the crowd is likely to be increasingly important in efforts to preserve our environment. But, just like alternative sources of energy, harnessing it so that it delivers reliable, useful results, can be difficult. We need some more ambitious ideas.

If you know of any crowdsourcing projects succeeding (or failing) to help the environment, please join the discussion below.

If you’ve ever started your own business, you’ll know that it’s not all champagne and billion-dollar IPOs. For any number of reasons, most new businesses die slow, painful deaths (but not before sucking up every dollar in a surrounding 3 mile radius).

One month into starting her own branded-stationary company, Mariam Naficy was well aware of this. Her company, Minted, was running out of money and had yet to sell even a single unit.

Traditionally, as a founder of a stationery startup, Ms Naficy has 3 options at this point: (1) weep; (2) cut her losses and move onto something new (thankful that at least her Christmas presents are sorted for the next fifty years); or (3) become a bitter pen-hoarding recluse.

Today, it seems, there is a fourth option. As a “last ditch move” Minted decided to turn its business into a design-contest site. Instead of having a team of in-house designers, it crowdsourced them, pitching hopeful designers against each other in a kind of talent contest, with winners chosen by vote.

For Minted, crowdsourcing meant more originality in the designs and (more importantly) plenty of exposure. Oh, and $5.5m worth of investment and sales upwards of $11m.

Of course, as readers of this blog know, Minted is by no means the first contest crowdsourcing site to net big investments. Proud solvers of the world’s hardest problems Kaggle, recently netted $11m. Another $3m has just gone to Design Crowd.

If these numbers are raising your eyebrows, then you’re not alone. Whether such sites are just a passing fad, more indicative of a tech bubble than a new, sustainable business-model, only time will tell. Either way, I don’t think anyone at Minted will be weeping into their champagne this Christmas.

Sometimes it seems there’s a lot of negativity towards the crowd. Whether it’s images of angry mobs with burning torches or hurtful terms like “mob mentality” and “tyranny of the majority”, our society often seems to favor the individual over the group.

We in the crowdsourcing industry have been working hard to dispel these myths and improve the image of the mob. Research underway at Cambridge University is doing just that, by using the crowd to help individuals who have more trouble than most fitting into society: people with autistic spectrum disorders.

Just put on a happy face
In the experiment participants are shown a number of short video snippets of people listening, talking or responding to some trigger. Their speech is garbled, so that what you hear is not what is said, but how it’s said (an important distinction, as anyone who has ever entered into a romantic relationship knows). They’re then asked to describe the emotional state of the subject with just one word.

What researchers have found is that we are remarkably good at reading people’s moods by their faces, voices and posture. So much so in fact, that we can now effectively say that for the far majority of people, X facial expression equals Y emotion (confirming what fans of Eric Conveys an Emotion have known for years.)

You read my mind
So what does this mean for autism sufferers? Quite a lot actually. Growing up, most of us learn to “read” facial expressions naturally. We just know that when a parent pulls that face, it means we’re in trouble. But to an autistic person, suffering from so called “mind blindness”, it’s not so simple. Researchers hope now it might be possible to teach autistic people facial expressions. In fact, Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge, has already produced The Mind Reading DVD, a comprehensive guide to reading facial expressions.

Of course we should celebrate our differences. But these developments – based on results obtained and verified by crowdsourcing – show that equally we should celebrate our similarities. After all, it’s these shared understandings that make human empathy so miraculously efficient. Even though we may be part of the crowd, we’re all still individuals.

When we consider humanity’s great achievements, the humble toilet does not usually rate a mention (unless to describe where the greatest failures ended up).

Yet in terms of making our lives better, sanitation – and the way it eradicated annoying things like the plague – is actually pretty important (don’t get me wrong, it’s no iPad or anything).

Which is why it stinks that so many people in the world do not have access to it.

Intrepid PhD student Mark Iliffe has been doing his best to do something about this in the slums of Kenya and Tanzania, using – you guessed it – crowdsourcing.

How do you say “where’s the WC?”
Mark’s scheme, The Tandale Mapping Project, aims to map sanitation services in the fast-growing, chronically under-resourced urban slums of Dar es Salaam. Armed only with integrity, an OpenStreetMap interface and (presumably) a really good Swahili dictionary, Mark’s team crowdsourced geo-located data from Tandale residents and students. As well as tapping into local knowledge, Mark claims that this approach” allows the community themselves to take ownership of the project”.

Results so far are impressive. In just a few weeks, residents have produced detailed maps of toilets and water access points across Tandale. The interface (clearly inspired by the famous Ushahidi platform) also allows residents to report sanitation problems via SMS and web forms. I guess now it’s up to governments and NGOs to actually do something with all that data.

My only issue with the (obviously worthy) Tandale project is what happens after the well-funded Western PhD student has packed-up his GPS and gone home? In other words, is the project sustainable?

Mark tackled this criticism in a recent blog post. He argues that by working with locals right from the start he’s created a “small nucleus of highly engaged people” who will “infect the community from the inside.” Let’s hope so because I’ve got a feeling that Mark Iliffe’s vision and enthusiasm has the potential to spread the civic crowdsourcing bug a whole lot further.

Well, almost… Red Herring picked Microtask as a finalist in their 2011 Top 100 Global award. I got the call from Alex Vieux himself a couple of days ago. We edged out close to 1000 companies from 40 different countries who submitted nominations, and we were invited to present our winning crowdsourcing strategy at the Red Herring Global forum in Los Angeles next month.

The official word from Red Herring is this:

“Technology companies are becoming the bright spot in the economic outlook based on their increasing role within macro-economic environments.“ Stated Alex Vieux, Chairman of Red Herring. “2011 has confirmed the sector’s vibrant activity and its resilience to widespread economic problems. An unprecedented number of entrepreneurs are attempting to jump ahead of the competition and aspire to make a difference. Breakthroughs obsolete each other faster than ever before. Microtask has performed exceptionally in its field and strongly deserves to be singled out as one of the Red Herring Global Finalists. At this stage, we are left with the daunting task to select the best qualified companies for the 2011 Top 100 Global Award.”

Hackers: ruthless cyber-villains out to steal and defraud, or virtual heroes fearlessly battling the security systems of evil corporations? Love them or hate them, hackers have always been around. They’re an inevitable online hazard – like trolls, 404 pages and inappropriate Nazi analogies.

Take the international “hactivism” group Anonymous (these guys are like WikiLeaks’ crazy kid brother). Back in April, Anonymous successfully obtained the credit card numbers of over 70 million Playstation users, exposing major security flaws at Sony. Just a few days ago, the same thing happened to gaming distribution platform Steam. Details are still emerging but Gabe Newell, Steam co-founder and beloved guru of the gaming industry, gave this not-very-reassuring advice: “watch your credit card.”

Clearly, the gaming industry has serious security issues. So, will we gamers soon be forced to abandon our consoles and (shock horror) face reality? Luckily, there may be a less drastic solution. Question: what’s the best way to make your system hack-proof? Answer: get a crowd of hackers to test it out, of course.

Top hats
Welcome to Hatforce a “crowdsourcing security testing service” complete with its own crowd of expert hackers. Just to be clear, these guys are white hats – good hackers (as opposed to the “bad” black hats like Anonymous).

As Hatforce CEO Arthur Gervais (who is still just 24 years old) explained to me: “we want to answer the question: how’s your security?”. The idea is simple. Clients set the Hatforce testers challenges and rewards – say €80 for every security vulnerability found in a system. To take part, wannabe testers have to register and sign an NDA. Legal stuff completed, the official hacking begins. All testing is done on a “no bugs no fee” basis (so if your system is secure, you get to save money and be smug).

A black and white issue?
So, I asked, surely the big question for Hatforce is: how do you make sure that the (1000s of) testers have good intentions? “There’s no guarantee,” Arthur says, “but we are running black box tests, which means no tester has the source code of the website at his or her disposal. Effectively, we don’t need to trust the hackers. Why would malicious hackers bother to sign a contract and NDA if they could attack you right away?”

According to Arthur, the real issue is people’s perception (let’s face it, hackers do have a bit of an image problem). To reassure clients, Hatforce is now offering a “Trusted Tester” service, where smaller groups of Hatforce testers are handpicked and have their identities verified. But, Arthur insists, while this might feel more secure, it’s actually “illogical to let fewer testers test your product, because the probability of finding flaws is smaller. So we want to keep the main idea: the crowd is the best tester for finding flaws in your application.”

Hatforce is a smart crowdsourced re-imagining of online security testing. Can the rest of the world be persuaded that the hacking crowd is actually a force for good? For the sake of Sony, Steam and gamers everywhere, I very much hope so.

In 2009 Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, famously claimed that “the sexy job in the next ten years will be statistician”. It still sounds pretty improbable right?

I mean, when did you last see a data-analyst fighting off screaming groupies? Statistics isn’t even a cool branch of maths.

Real “pure” mathematicians wrestle with the fundamental mysteries of the universe. Statisticians wrestle with pie charts.

Sexiness aside, Hal’s point was (probably) that in our information-driven world, statisticians are a precious, in-demand resource. Without them, companies like Google would drown in a tsunami of data. Recently, Silicon Valley funders proved just how much they appreciate the humble number cruncher, investing over $11 million in Australian data analytics crowdsourcing start-up Kaggle.

Kaggle is a classic “brain-based” crowd competition site. Organizations post statistical problems and Kaggle’s crowd of “the world’s best data analysts” compete to solve them. As well as prize money, Kaggle boasts various gamified incentives such as a real-time leader board and “kudos point” rankings. Only founded in 2010, the company has had an impressive first year. Completed competitions include: working with NASA on dark matter (okay I admit that’s pretty cool), improving the World Chess Federation’s official rating system (still reasonably cool) and accurately predicting the outcome of the Eurovision Song contest (totally uncool, but very profitable).

Founder Anthony Goldbloom aims to grow Kaggle into a “buzzing hive” able to support “hundreds or thousands of data scientists relying on Kaggle for their full-time incomes”. It’s an ambitious step-up from other, older science competition sites (InnoCentive is a classic example) which tend to market crowdsourcing as a rewarding hobby rather than a career choice. Professionalizing will be a major challenge. Can Goldbloom really guarantee enough competitions to support thousands of workers? At the time of writing, Kaggle has over 17,000 data analysts and only 12 active competitions. Okay, there are a couple of big prizes up for grabs, but I certainly wouldn’t want to depend on Kaggle for a regular income.

Investors clearly see potential in Kaggle. Will the company “buck the trend” and manage to convert all the money and media-hype into statistically significant growth? Perhaps we should get the Kaggle crowd to calculate the probabilities.