What are you planning to do on July 19th? “Laying on a beach sipping a mojito” could be an answer, the wrong one. What we really want to hear is “I’m attending Crowdopolis 2012 in Los Angeles”. See? It wasn’t that hard, and we heard conferences are even easier on your skin.

Quick recap: that day, our friends of Daily Crowdsource are organizing an event about the future of crowdsourcing in advertising, tech, and content marketing. And they want you, the forward thinking Bigwigs!

You can take a look at the agenda from here (it’s a work in progress, so make sure you check it periodically) and at the confimed list of speakers from here.

Specially priced early birds tickets are going fast, so make sure you buy one now.

Plus, you’ll be able to attend the VIP-only pre-party held on the 18th, and the afterparty after the final presentation. Fun, it even looks like you’ll get that mojito eventually.

Photography has come a long way. Two centuries ago taking a family photo meant standing perfectly still for ten minutes in a pose stiffer than a waxed mustache. Now we’ve all got multi-megapixel cameras built into our phones (or cans of processed meat), and if we want that scratchy sepia look without the waiting around, we can just use an Instagram filter.

This is great, especially for people like me who like to take photos. The downside is that the more photos we have, the harder it is to sort them in a way that makes them useful in the future. The trigger happy amongst us now feel like we are drowning in a sea of digital photos.

Before you cast away your digital cameras and save yourselves (yes, I’m exaggerating the problem slightly), hope is here. It’s called the Descriptive Camera, and it intends to bring a whole new perspective to photography.

Say ‘Crowd!’

The brainchild of ‘creative technologist’ Matt Richardson, the prototype Descriptive Camera does exactly what the name suggests. You point the camera and press the shutter button, but instead of a photograph, the built-in printer spits out a short text description of your image (it turns out a picture is in fact worth about 150 words).

So how does it work? Advanced pattern-recognition software? Quantum Entanglement? A tiny prehistoric bird? The answer, as regular readers of this blog will probably have guessed, is crowdsourcing. The Descriptive Camera uploads images to Mechanical Turk, where users are paid a small fee for providing a brief text description. Thanks to the popularity of Mechanical Turk, and the relatively high price per task of $1.25, Richardson says that it typically takes between three and six minutes to ‘develop’ each photo.

Tell me a picture

The Descriptive Camera was designed primarily to help categorize all those photos on our hard drives. By including the unique description in each photo file, the Descriptive Camera allows text-searching of photographs. Looking for a picture of a mountain? Just search for mountain. A sunset? Search for sunset. Sounds great so far, but there are limits: how about a picture of your parents? Anonymous Turkers are unlikely to be able to recognize your mother and father, or be familiar with your friends and pets (at least we hope they won’t). Despite this potential limitation, the Descriptive Camera, (which is still in the experimental stage), may prove an important step on the road to more manageable images.

But as well as offering a potential solution to a cluttered ‘My Pictures’ folder, the Descriptive Camera is also a great example of what can be done with crowdsourcing platforms like Mechanical Turk (and say …ummm… Microtask, for example). It’s now possible for anyone to bring the crowd into their project, whether it’s a towering data processing task or a quirky prototype like the Descriptive Camera.

This means that innovative thinkers like Matt Richardson are free to pursue unorthodox ideas and create unique crowd-based projects. But it also shows just how easy it’s becoming to incorporate the crowd into everyday life. As the Descriptive Camera shows, it’s entirely possible to fit a whole crowd in your pocket.

A recent interview on Daily Crowdsource with Manuel Cebrian (you might remember him from such groundbreaking crowdsourcing projects as 2009’s DARPA Red Balloon Challenge and last month’s Tag Challenge) about crowdsourcing and crime got me thinking.

It occurred to me that the Joker from The Dark Knight may be the first ever super-villain to use crowdsourcing for his own nefarious (probably my favorite “evil-doer adjective”) means. I’m talking about when the Joker interrupts regularly-scheduled programming to announce his intent to blow up a hospital unless somebody kills the guy who knows Batman’s identity.

When I first saw this, I remember thinking: this is clever. The Joker’s ultimatum was not your typical ransom note or threat; something covert sent to the family of a rich kidnapping victim, or phoned into a school. In actuality, it was a perverse form of crowdsourcing: “I’m appealing to the community to do something terrible on my behalf, or I’m going to kill people.” By tapping into the mainstream media, he reached “tipping point” in a matter of seconds, and his “call to action” was immediately heeded.

It led me to think about how social media could be exploited by criminals. I came up with two scenarios (super-villains get your pad and pencils ready):

The Crowdsourcing Terrorist
What if a status update popped up on the home page of every Facebook or Twitter saying if they want to save the Eiffel Tower, they must visit such and such website (I’ll provide details of this site and bank numbers at a later date) and click the “donate $5” button. If the target figure of $5 million is not reached in 12 hours, the Eiffel Tower will be blown up. Essentially what I’m talking about is a cross between crowdfunding site Kickstarter and those absurd guilt-trip chain emails saying kids will die if you don’t forward the message.

Like the Joker, in my example, the criminal puts the onus on the community to meet his demands – or at the very least places a psychological burden on everyone who reads his message – gaining critical mass via social media. While I’m no expert cyber-fraudster (my bank balance can conclusively prove this), I’m guessing that police would have trouble tracing the villain’s identity or bank details in 12 hours.

The Crowdsourcing Thug
This idea evolved from the “flash rob crimes” that hit Chicago last year, in which groups of thieves, coordinating via Twitter, contrived to show up at a certain store at a certain time to rob the place. A few of them were caught, but most got away (if you’re a store owner, what are you going to do when 30 people proceed to simultaneously overpower you, rob you, and then run away in 30 different directions?)

I could see a criminal mastermind (one who’s fond of wearing a Zoot suit and a monocle, and stroking a pink ferret) logging onto Facebook/Twitter and offering to buy the spoils from anyone willing to rob “jewelry store x”. Unlike the “Eiffel Tower” plot, the announcement wouldn’t be made to the general public. 50 thugs could organize and decide to hit the store at the same time. Of the group, 10 are waiting outside in getaway cars, promised a cut of the loot and another 10 have signed up as lookouts. As with the flash rob crimes, the police will nab a few, but it’s likely that most of the group will get away with some loot.

In the interview, Cebrian says that like other high-profile technologies such as nuclear power and genetic engineering, it’s only a matter of time before crowdsourcing experiences a negative event. I completely agree, and am somewhat curious to see what form it takes (bwhahaha!).

More importantly, I hope law enforcement agencies worldwide are considering the negative potential of crowdsourcing, and drawing up contingencies to address it. These should include preventative measures, designed to catch these super-villains before they hurt someone and damage the reputation of our industry.

After casually revolutionizing the worlds of design, data-processing and translation, the crowd is now getting to work on the business of government. Iceland is preparing to implement a crowdsourced constitution, and this March the Finnish Parliament passed the Citizens’ Initiative Act. The Act allows any citizen to present a law to Parliament, providing they can get the support of 50,000 citizens.

Spotting the opportunity for a groundbreaking piece of online activism, Finnish entrepreneur Joonas Pekkanen assembled a team of volunteers, including web-development wizard Aleksi Rossi, and created the Avoin Ministeriö, or Open Ministry. The site allows Finns to submit proposals for legislation, which are then debated and refined by the site’s membership. We sat down with Joonas and Aleksi to discuss the possibilities for crowdsourced lawmaking.

I understand the first proposal submitted to the site was a bill to repeal the tax on dog ownership, and that it came from you, Joonas. Why did you choose that as your starting point?

Joonas: It is an obvious idea with a lot of support, and it is a good way to show what the site can do. Last time I checked it had a few hundred supporters, so it’s not anywhere near the 50,000, but it’s a start, and not bad for just a few weeks.

Will you continue to be personally involved in the drafting process?

Aleksi: There are two different things happening here. There is Open Ministry, which is the group of individuals that set up the site, which includes Joonas. But Joonas is also acting as an individual, who has now presented four or five ideas. This was first to show the capability of the site, and also to underline the fact that while Joonas is a part of the Open Ministry, he is also a citizen called Joonas who can submit his ideas.

Joonas: The point being that the Open Ministry doesn’t have opinions as an institution. The Open Ministry doesn’t present any ideas or have any opinions itself.

Do you have to exert any editorial control over the proposals?

Joonas: We were originally quite worried that we would have to moderate the content, but we’ve been very positively surprised that we have not had to moderate a single comment or a single idea. We’ve had some 130 ideas already, and obviously not all of them are good ideas. But there has been no illegal or derogatory material, or anything offensive or inappropriate. Obviously part of this is due to the fact that we ask people to sign up using their real name.

Aleksi: I was just checking the comments and users recently, and I found that out of over a thousand users, only one has signed up without registering and confirming their identity. He has only left one comment, and it is of quite low quality!

How is the project financed?

Joonas: At some point we will probably need some funding, but at the moment and in the foreseeable future, we try to be completely non-money driven, so there is no funding, there are no sponsorships, and nobody is able to donate any money at the moment. Maybe that will change in six months or so, but for the moment we try to be as effective as possible on a purely voluntary basis.

So what are you working on now?

Joonas: We have already executed these first ideas and put the framework in place, but the project is very much a work-in-progress. What we need right now is for individuals to start to do voluntary work and make things happen. For that we need experts to get involved. We need more lawyers, we definitely need more developers, and we need people who are able to talk with the media. We also need people to act as liaison for different citizen associations. We need to make sure that people are first informed, then engaged. There’s plenty of room for many types of individuals.

Aleksi: We’ve basically tried to create a playground for democracy. It will be interesting to see what happens next.

Today’s blog involves a thrilling tale of international espionage. But for once the hero is not an alcoholic, sex-addicted Englishman with a fancy exploding pen. This time it’s a rather remarkable crowd.

So before you read further, please ensure that your Cone of Silence has been activated, and that nobody has cut any eye holes in any of your paintings. All done? Good, then I can begin.

The story begins in 2010, when Iranian state computers were brought to a standstill by a highly infectious virus named Trojan-Spy.0485/Malware-Cryptor.Win32.Inject.gen.2 (or Stuxnet if you’re human). Experts at the big antivirus companies concluded that Stuxnet was probably created by the US or Israeli intelligence services, and was designed to cripple the Iranian nuclear program.

This blog will self destruct in ten seconds

Of course, the US and Israel responded with the traditional mantra of the intelligence community: deny all knowledge. The story seemed to go away. The idea of governments releasing their own viruses into the wild is pretty sinister, but not quite as bad as the thought of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s finger hovering over a nuclear button. Stuxnet was specifically designed to target Iran’s illegally-imported Siemens supercomputers, so why should the rest of us worry? Besides, the threat seemed to be over.

But then in 2011 a new virus was discovered by analysts at Budapest University’s (awesomely named) CrySys Lab. It was called Duqu, and it shared some key similarities with the Stuxnet virus. But while Stuxnet’s purpose was obvious, Duqu worked in more mysterious ways. It passed through millions of machines without a trace, but wiped the hard drives of others. Much of its code was written in an unidentified language. What was its purpose? And how was it made? Even the experts at the big antivirus companies were stumped.

Nobody had the answers, until Igor Soumenkov of Kaspersky labs decided to call on the crowd for assistance. In a blog post, Soumenkov outlined the problem and provided samples of the virus code. Within hours a crowd was born, colonizing the comment thread and establishing a presence on Reddit.

The man with the golden crowd

Soumenkov’s crowd is a perfect example of the power of collective reasoning. Members quickly sifted through the code, picking out familiar features and eliminating possible answers. Some worked alone, some in groups. With their help, Soumenkov was able to close the case and identify the code. He concluded that Duqu appears to be the work of the same team that created Stuxnet, and is an aggressive data gathering tool. The intended target of the virus remains unknown, but the crowd is still investigating.

So why did Soumenkov’s crowd work so well? Part of its success was due to Soumenkov himself. He presented the problem clearly and responded to questions quickly, providing extra information when needed. This kind of feedback is crucial to getting the most out of a crowd. At Microtask we use some pretty incredible (if I do say so myself) code of our own to verify the accuracy of our Microtaskers and let them know how well they’re doing. By being given feedback, a task-oriented crowd can learn and improve. This kind of clear direction is vital to a crowd’s success.

The Duqu affair shows how powerful collective reasoning really is. Soumenkov’s crowd of volunteers managed to crack a code created by the world’s most powerful, well-funded state security agency (probably). As well as helping to cure infected computers, the crowd shone a light into one of the darkest corners of international relations. In a world filled with mysterious super-viruses and shadowy government hacking teams, it’s nice to know the crowd’s got your back.

To a crowdsourcing evangelist like me, the idea of a crowdsourced nation sounds like heaven on earth. Just think: a country where the wisdom of crowds trumps the ulterior motives of politicians, and the people rule supreme. But despite my limitless optimism, I can’t help thinking that the people are also responsible for littering, traffic jams and the career of Justin Bieber. Just how effective could a crowdsourced constitution be?

Rip it up and start again

Last year we reported on Iceland’s plans to crowdsource a new constitution. The official Facebook page has received an almost Bieber-worthy 16,000 comments, and the constitution could be ratified as early as June 1st. Now it looks like the idea is spreading.

The Scottish Assembly has invited members of Iceland’s Constitutional Council to speak at a special event held by the policy group Nordic Horizons. This group leads Scotland’s efforts to emulate the success of, well, Nordic folk like me I guess (oh, and Nordic-style education, healthcare and equality, but mostly me).

Crowdsourcing constitutional change was, of course, big news in North Africa and the Middle East last year. The rash of revolutions in these areas created new states in need of new constitutions (and probably tripled Bashar al-Assad’s life insurance premiums). As we have previously discussed, it’s nice to think that you can use the same suite of apps to help topple a tyrant or build a nation. Sadly, it also takes a lot more than a Facebook page to rebuild a whole country’s infrastructure: the efforts of the crowd in these regions had only limited success.

But a country doesn’t have to need a whole new constitution to take advantage of crowdsourcing. Shortly after his election, Barack Obama set up the We The People site, which gives citizens the chance to post petitions online. If a petition gets 25,000 signatures in 30 days, the White House must issue a response. However, critics have pointed out that no matter how much support an issue gets, the most voters can expect is a courteous reply from the President. It offers no direct influence on policy.

No, the friendly kind of CIA

Meanwhile (and more importantly) in Finland, the Citizens’ Initiative Act has been in effect since the beginning of March. The Act allows any citizen to propose a new law to Parliament, as long as they can get the support of 50,000 eligible voters. Aiming to help Finns make the most of the Act, a group of volunteer activists, software engineers and researchers created the Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry). There, voters can present their ideas to the crowd, offer support for policy initiatives which catch their eye and join in debates.

While the US has dipped a toe into the warm, radiant waters of crowdsourcing, Finland has plunged straight in. Unlike the We The People programme’s arms-length approach, the Citizens’ Initiative Act allows citizens direct access to policymaking, and it will be interesting to follow its development (and see how soon it is before someone suggests declaring war on Sweden).

The current crop of constitutional projects represents a new frontier for collaborative reasoning. Though Iceland’s constitution has yet to be seen in operation and the Finnish CIA is in its infancy, those of us at the commercial end of crowdsourcing will be able to learn valuable lessons from these large-scale initiatives. Let’s just hope those lessons are more ‘Wow! That’s amazing!’ than ‘Oh no, how can we avoid that?’

For most new ventures, the funding process is the most malignant of the many necessary evils they have to overcome. For months, if not years, they must devote a huge portion of their resources towards one single goal: getting enough cash to carry on operations. When funders are enlightened and things go right, the payback can be huge. But when innovative, good ideas are met with wariness – for whatever reason – they must be sacrificed on the altar of the mighty dollar.

The gaming business was no exception to this process, with triple A games only funded when the people with the money could understand them (which usually meant they were based on earlier games that were financially successful). Over time, some veterans of the industry and many players started to develop an honest dislike for such products, which felt like the outcome of focus groups rather than inspired innovation.

As recent fundraising for gaming company Double Fine has shown, crowdfunding site Kickstarter is now changing these rules.

Traditional publishers vs the crowd
Funding is a big issue for game developers because making good games costs money. A lot of money. Developing a decent downloadable game can cost up to $2M, while a high class retail product can easily blow out the budget to $40-50M. That’s not the kind of money you can ask the crowd for, right? Wrong. Apparently now, it is ($2m that is, not quite $40m… yet).

Double Fine, a company founded by Tim Schafer and employing Ron Gilbert –
both known mostly for their work on the Monkey Island series – is a well established software house with a bunch of good minor games covering various genres.

Despite Schafer’s more recent work, people stubbornly kept asking him to go back to the genre in which he excels: point-and-click adventure games. The problem is that these games are on the blacklist of traditional publishers: they’re slow-paced, old fashioned and usually don’t feature enough guns or explosions to be considered “sellable”.

Schafer thought long and hard about a solution to this situation, until he decided, half-jokingly, to set up a Kickstarter fundraising appeal and ask his stubborn fans to put their money where their mouths are. The response has been staggering: with the idea of developing a small adventure game, the set goal of $400k was met within the first few hours, reaching a total of $3.4M after a 30 day period. Needless to say, the Double Fine guys seem to be pretty happy with the result (it’s an all-time Kickstarter record), and have started to consider many new features for their “small” game.

Is this only the beginning?
After the first days of excitement, market analysts appeared to agree that this exploit was only possible because of the respect gamers still hold for Schafer as a person and for his mastery of a certain style of games. In other words: a lucky coincidence.

Other people think differently. Invigorated by his success, developers such as InXile (captained by Brian Fargo, creator of the original Fallout) and Stoic (a team of ex-Bioware employees) have started campaigns which have met with a similar level of excitement.

Should traditional publishers now fear the rise of niches? Could Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail theories somehow also apply to a big-bucks market like gaming? But most importantly, is funding shifting from the deep pockets of the “elite” to the not-so-deep-pockets of a vast crowd of gamers who want to be included in the decision process?

It’s maybe a bit early to pop the champagne, as consumers are not blindly funding projects just to send signals to evil corporations. However, a move has been made and the outcome of this game might see the smaller players triumph. Hopefully, in future, this will mean that the most malignant of the necessary evils that game designers deal with will be the nasty characters they dream up for the final level of their games. (No doubt they will still draw inspiration for these characters from their experience with the “old fashioned” funding process.)

Forget about global warming, zombie apocalypses, Mayan prophecies and asteroid impacts. Those things are all absurd. What you should be worried about is an impending invasion by moon Nazis. They’re up there, in their secret moon base waiting to return to Earth and complete their plans for world domination.

That’s according to the plot of Iron Sky, a new crowdsourced film by Finnish filmmakers Samuli Torssonen and Timo Vuorensola. They’ve also created the film crowdsourcing website, Wreckamovie, which lets film makers submit production tasks to the crowd. We managed to catch up with Samuli during a busy promotion schedule to ask him a few questions.

The official premiere is April 4th but you’ve already shown the film at a few major festivals including Berlinale and SXSW. What has the reception been like so far?

Generally the response has been really great! The comment we hear most often is that the film really exceeded everybody’s expectations (even the sceptical ones).

How much of the film would you say was produced through crowdsourcing?

There were a lot of small things that came together in the finished film. For example, lots of plot ideas that ended up in the script came in from the crowd. The community also designed and printed prop posters for a scene in Germany and produced some 3D models of Earth Force’s ships. Audio recordings for Earth Ship captains were also by the crowd.

In effect we had the world’s biggest marketing department working for us, for free. And of course there was a lot of money raised, without which the film could never have been produced.

What did you learn from crowdsourcing your first film StarWreck that you were able to apply to the production of Iron Sky?

We found overall that tasks which take between 2-3 hours bring the best results. One of the most important things we learnt was that people really are willing to help you if they feel you have a worthy project and you are ultimately giving something back.

Do you think a film in the sci-fi genre is more suited to a crowdsourced production than say a drama or a thriller?

I think it helps because sci-fi fans tend to be more active online. This makes it easier to reach your audience and interact with them. I think other genres can be crowdsourced effectively if you can convince the audience that your project is special and worth their time.

You also created a website for crowdsourcing films called Wreckamovie. Do you have any plans to implement an algorithmic distribution system on the site?

At this point we don’t have any plans for an algorithmic distribution system but the tools and user interface we have now still need a lot of work. We are working on improving it, looking at how we and others want to use crowdsourcing. We need to evolve and learn new techniques.

What do you see for the future of crowdsourced movies?

I think this is just the beginning of digital crowdsourcing. In the future I think online tools will become more effective and easier to use, and we will get better at motivating people to take part in productions.

As more and more distributed rendering projects come online, independent film makers will have access to almost unlimited processing power. To me the future looks great (if we can just survive the invasion from the moon Nazis).

Unless you’re a solitary hermit with no Facebook friends, you’ll have seen the Kony 2012 film, which racked up an astonishing 70m hits in its first week. You may also have heard the criticisms of Invisible Children, the charity behind the film, and read the charity’s response to its critics.

Leaving aside these issues, the nature of the campaign and its enormous viral success are clearly very interesting from a crowdsourcing perspective. Obviously the organizers have done a lot of things right. But is getting the crowd to spend $30 (plus shipping and handling) on posters of Kony actually the best way to achieve the film’s goal of ‘changing the course of human history?’ Could the crowd be used more effectively?

Wanted, dead or alive

For all the success of the Kony 2012 campaign, a cynical crowdsourcing evangelist (not me) might point out that Kony 2012 is really more a large-scale awareness campaign than a truly innovative use of the crowd.

The campaign’s main purpose is to make Kony, and his terrible crimes, famous. It does this with a slick video, and by distributing posters and bracelets. But with the campaign’s aims decided in advance by a central authority, there’s not much for the crowd to get their collective teeth into.

This lack of meaningful engagement is exacerbated by the campaign’s focus on (primarily) US Facebook users, rather than those people more directly involved in the conflict. Uganda currently has 387,000 Facebook users, with the number growing by over 10,000 per month. Though this only represents just over 1% of the population, Uganda’s online community presents an incredible opportunity for charities to engage with the issues.

A more inclusive campaign may have avoided some of the controversy surrounding the video, which has been accused of ignoring African perspectives and advocating a US intervention which has already been implemented.

Let the crowd get to work

This single minded focus and pre-determined goal is probably part of the reason Kony 2012 has achieved such phenomenal exposure so quickly. But it also exposes the campaign to potentially damaging criticism which can undermine even the best of intentions. So what could charities learn from the crowdsourcing revolution?

As Google’s Against Violent Extremism project shows, crowd-based activism can work extremely well when it’s based around a free exchange of information and ideas. Against Violent Extremism provides a space for people on all sides of the problem to come together, debate the issues and formulate solutions. No central authority dictates the goals or methods, and many projects can come together under the same banner. By including everybody in the conversation and working together, there’s more to online activism than just clicking ‘like’.

Despite the campaign’s arguable shortcomings, Invisible Children’s empathy and enthusiasm have brought the issue of child soldiers to the centre of the global conversation. If nothing else, the Kony 2012 campaign sends a message to other despots that the world cares about their crimes. If it leads to the arrest or death of Kony, the campaign will not only change this region of Africa, but the world. Hopefully their next campaign will avoid controversy by letting the crowd work their magic, and be even bigger.

The human brain is an amazing thing. A few pounds of gray matter has taken us from eating bananas in the trees to walking on the moon (it’s also brought us LOLcats, the Car Laptop Tray and Maailmanennätys muurahaispesässä, but still: the moon). With our heads filled with crackling synapses, it’s easy to feel smug about our computational prowess.

But if the history of neurological research has shown anything, it’s that our brains are far less reliable than we may think (one look at Wikipedia’s list of cognitive biases is enough to make anyone want to trade theirs for a Commodore 64). With such clear evidence that individual brains are unreliable, why should we assume that collective reasoning is any better?

Thankfully, researchers Stefan M. Herzog and Ralph Hertwig have investigated this very question, and set out to challenge Thomas Carlyle’s observation that “I do not believe in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” We’ve written before about the dangers of overestimating your own ability, but what if our stupidity is our secret weapon?

Stupid is as stupid does?

Herzog and Hertwig designed a novel experiment to compare the ability of experts and uninformed subjects when predicting the results of sporting matches. They created an ‘ignorant crowd’ of people with no special interest in sport, and asked them to predict the outcome of several football matches. Surprisingly, the ignorant crowd was significantly more accurate than the experts. The experiment was repeated, this time with a slightly more knowledgeable crowd of amateur tennis players, who were asked to rate the chances of a list of players. Again, despite each member of the ignorant crowd only recognizing an average of 39% of the named players, the ignorant crowd thrashed the experts.

But before we kick out the professors and start staffing our universities with Fox News ‘reporters’, it’s worth taking a look at Herzog and Hertwig’s conclusions. Despite the individual crowd members’ lack of knowledge or insight, their success was due to a uniquely collective ability to process several factors, including media saturation and word-of-mouth reputation. In short, better football teams or tennis players generate more discussion. In statistics, this is known as the recognition heuristic. Unlike the standard sports-movie plot, where a plucky underdog takes down the arrogant champion, in real life it’s usually the richest, most famous names that win.

Ignorant and proud?

Herzog and Hertwig have named the effect ‘the ignorance of crowds,’ but what do their findings mean for the crowdsourcing industry? Firstly, it’s important to note that the ignorance of crowds effect only applies to predicting things like sporting events. Secondly, the experiment doesn’t show that ignorance is more effective than expertise (Sorry, Rick Santorum, I didn’t mean to get your hopes up). The most important conclusion for our industry is the fact that crowds are capable of incorporating a broad range of factors in their decision-making, whether they are conscious of it or not.

But that’s not all that this experiment has to teach us. The fact that a properly designed crowd of amateurs can make better predictions than experts is highly significant for companies like Microtask, as it demonstrates the importance of organization. For example, the DigiTalkoot project only requires volunteers to be able to read. The more specialized work of compiling the work of crowd members is left to software designed by experts, just as Herzog and Hertwig’s ignorant crowd were able to make accurate predictions thanks to the expert organizational and analytic skills of the researchers.

The combination of a crowd and a well-designed framework for them to operate in is when the magic of crowd labor really occurs. Like Voltron, we’re more powerful when we join together, but someone always needs to be the head.

The other day our beloved galactic emperor CEO Ville Miettinen was featured in an interview published by FounderLY, a website dedicated to entrepreneurs who have founded potentially disruptive tech companies.

In these two videos, Ville gives in insight into how Microtask got to where it is today: the idea inception, its evolution, the early days, funding, the background of the Management Team, the learning process, mistakes and successes. If you want to know what happened behind the scenes, check them out!

What comes to mind when you hear the phrase ‘think tank’? A passionately engaged team of experts, using their knowledge to shape the social discourse? A bunch of overeducated technocrats with no experience of the real world, dictating our futures? A telepathically-operated war machine?

Whatever your opinion, think tanks – or policy research units – are everywhere, clustering around democracy like barnacles on a ship’s hull. The traditional think tank model, which sees a group of experts working to solve economic, social or military problems, sounds like a great idea on paper, but it is open to abuse. Private interests can set up their own think tanks in order to pursue their own agendas, as with the sorry tale of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition, which was set up by tobacco firm Philip Morris in the 1990s to dispute medical research on the negative consequences of smoking.

But thanks to some new initiatives, the traditional think tank model may soon be turned on its head. The new UK think tank newthinktank (most imaginative name ever) aims to bust open the walls of the Ivory Tower by inviting the crowd to contribute to its research efforts. Newthinktank aims to create an online forum where public service employees and users can come together to share their experiences, orchestrate research and generate policy ideas. The project is still in its infancy, but could be a fascinating experiment into the possibility of crowdsourced policymaking.

Shooting for the moon

Google has also introduced its high-profile Solve For X project, which aims to use imagination, discussion, emergent technology and cult author Neal Stephenson’s inspirational beard to address some of the world’s most persistent problems. Its panel of experts are encouraged to think big and aim for what Google’s Director of New Projects Astro Teller calls ‘moonshots,’ or ideas which “live in the grey area between audacious projects and pure science fiction.”

These ‘moonshots’ are then turned over to the crowd for discussion, debate and refinement. Right now, the Solve for X site is brimming with optimistic, exciting and unrealistic ideas from Teller and his panel of experts, but the crowd-based discussion and development element appears underdeveloped. Like Newthinktank, the project is still in the early stages though, and it would be unfair to judge it too harshly at this point.

Why can’t we all just get along?

But while Google CEO Eric Schmidt and co-founder Sergey Brin are busily plotting the future benefits of stretchable electronics, Google has another project which may serve as a vital template for crowdsourced policymaking and genuine problem solving. It’s called Google Ideas and despite its very un-Google-like online bashfulness (the initiative doesn’t even have a website), its first project, Against Violent Extremism, has been a huge success. In addition to creating a ‘marketplace’ where users can offer or request resources for anti-extremist projects, Google recently flew 80 former neo-Nazis, Jihadists, gang members and terrorists to a summit in Dublin where they met with survivors of terrorist attacks, kidnappings and other forms of violence, as well as politicians, academics and members of the public.

This unique crowd is able to look at the problem of violence from all angles, and judging by the number of projects fighting for space on the site’s marketplace, their debates are incredibly productive, creating policy ideas as well as ideas for new crowdsourced projects. There is no central organizer, and as one of the first truly crowd-run projects, it offers a valuable example of how crowds can not only complete tasks but also identify and organize them.

We’ve written before about the hype surrounding crowd-based revolution, but this kind of crowdsourced policymaking may offer a glimpse of some exciting new forms of government. Google’s idea of bringing such disparate viewpoints together to work towards a common goal in some ways is at the heart of the crowdsourcing movement. Hopefully this model will inspire similar ventures around the world.

Since the global financial crisis, rich countries have increasingly come to see manufacturing as a reliable driver of growth. Globalization, of course, means that it is more difficult than ever for rich countries to compete with developing countries in this sector of the economy.

In this environment, crowdsourcing is increasingly recognized as a good way to enhance innovation and develop better products more efficiently. For a variety of reasons, however, many companies are hesitant about importing it into their development processes. Below I set out concrete ways that companies can overcome some of these issues.

Reflections of a software analyst
For the last year and a half I’ve been covering the manufacturing industry as a software analyst for Software Advice, a site that reviews manufacturing software. Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time analyzing how tools such as Salesforce’s Chatter are making their way into the industry and how they can improve supply chain and shop floor collaboration.

All of this got me thinking: why should collaboration be limited to in-house experts? How can companies alter their processes so that outsiders can help?

Crowdsourcing speeds up innovation
By now it’s pretty well documented that if run properly, crowdsourcing can bring products to market faster and at a lower cost. Proctor & Gamble experimented with crowdsourcing a while back to find a way to print images onto its Pringles cans. Its search led it to a small Italian bakery that had figured out how to print images onto pastries. P&G licensed the technology and was able to bring its idea to market in a little under a year.

Because crowdsourcing proved successful in this instance, it decided to expand its crowdsourcing efforts. P&G currently relies on outside collaboration for a full 50 percent of its innovations. But it’s not alone: several large companies have started to lean on the wisdom of crowds for production innovation. Among them are companies like Chlorox, 3M, Johnson & Johnson and many others.

How to bring crowdsourcing into the mainstream
These companies are the exception rather than the rule for a variety of reasons. Most important amongst these seem to be a fear of change, uncertainty about intellectual property rights, and a lack of design sharing technologies. Luckily, each of these obstacles can be overcome. Here are three ways to bring crowdsourcing into mainstream manufacturing.

1. Start small and work your way up. A lot of manufacturing companies are uneasy about opening up their development processes to outside influences. To work around this mentality companies should start off using crowdsourcing for a small project to get management used to this method of innovation. After a few successes, they can work their way up to bigger projects.

2. Protect intellectual property by dividing responsibilities. Many companies are (understandably) also nervous that the crowd may steal their ideas or intellectual property and share them with competitors. This is a legitimate concern but one that can be mitigated by compartmentalizing roles of the project. By narrowly defining who gets access to what, the problem of intellectual property theft can be managed.

3. Make it easier to share design files. Right now, there is no standard for sharing CAD (computer aided design) files because there is no standard software format for the files. This makes it difficult for project collaborators to share their designs with others. Without a way to share files, it’s pretty tough to change and adapt different designs. Creating a universal standard for CAD files could greatly enhance the potential for crowdsourcing and collaborative innovation.

A few years ago, crowdsourced product development was almost unheard of in the manufacturing industry. Although some early adopters are now effectively using crowdsourcing, whether or not it catches on across industry as a whole may depend on how well companies can navigate the obstacles outlined above. For the sake of European and American manufacturing industries – and economies as a whole – I hope they succeed.

A while ago, while trying to avoid some work, I watched this TED presentation by Luis von Ahn.

While his name might not ring a bell for everyone, his legacy definitely will: he is the guy behind reCAPTCHA, the bot-blocking service that uses all of us to help digitize the archives of The New York Times and Google Books. (Just think: every time you have to squint your eyes and turn your head sideways to decipher those annoyingly blurry squiggly words, you’re making the world a better place. Still, feel free to swear while you do it.)

In this TED presentation, von Ahn introduces his new project, Duolingo. Duolingo’s goal, in short, is to crowdsource language teaching. Here’s the twist: users will be able to learn a new tongue free of charge while translating the web through (unpaid, obviously) microwork.

Given the revolutionary nature of this idea, you can understand my excitement when the invitation for the Duolingo Beta landed recently in my mailbox. (It was also a great chance to refresh my rusty Spanish skills, recently put to the test – with mediocre results – while exploring a notorious Caribbean island.)

A brilliant user interface

At first glance, Duolingo is clean, friendly and sleek. There is no hint of the annoying and unintentionally funny user interface associated with reCAPTCHA.
To begin with, the platform gave me a quick tour, introducing really basic concepts and allowing me to try my hand at translating simple sentences. At any time I could hover on each linguistic particle to see a suggested translation.

I was then introduced to a skill tree, which some gamers out there will be used to, but is novel in a language teaching context.

Upon starting the first “lesson” (“exercises” would be a better term for what they are in practice), three familiar hearts appeared on the top right of the window. This is a way to check quality: if you lose all three you must start over.

After a few excercises I was humbled by my very first achievement. I’d like to thank the Academy (and my parents) for making this possible.

Then it was time to do some actual (micro)work, translating the web. At this point the interface changed slightly. I was asked to translate a sentence, which could be played in audio format and had an accompanying picture to help me understand the concept in context.

The actual sentence was “Ilumina la piscina”. I went with a straightforward (in my mind) “Light the pool”. It turns out Duolingo demands precision: two other users provided a better translation (“Illuminate the swimming pool”). I lost one heart. Ouch!

The second sentence went better, as my translation matched the others.

For the third sentence I scored a “60% agreement”, meaning that one user translated the sentence like me and the other suggested a second option.

After the check, Duolingo asked me to rate the other users’ performances. I assume this is their way to crosscheck the quality of translations. It would be interesting to know how many times they need to do that before being sure of an answer (industry standard, as far as I know, is around 7 times).

…And the first task was complete. More achievements, points and unlocks! The gamer in me rejoiced.

My verdict

It’s easy to get excited about Duolingo (especially if you don’t get out much). Given it is estimated that only 0,5% of what needs to be translated today is actually translated (due to high cost and other contraints), if it takes off it could really change the world.

So should the rest of the translation industry be afraid? I decided to ask an expert in the matter, Jani Penttinen. Jani said he can’t see how Duolingo could sufficiently guarantee quality to make it a serious threat to professional translation services, but he does “see it as a great way to get translations to consumers, in areas where it is not currently possible to translate content due to high cost.”

In my view, Von Ahn and friends have done a great job of designing the interaction between users and the platform so that the concept works as intended. That alone is a huge achievement. I would need to spend more quality time with Duolingo to see if it will really help me learn Spanish, but it certainly is much more appealing than boring grammar books. Now, if they could only add Finnish to the list of available languages and help fix that little drama of mine…

With its mysterious, often invisible army of workers diligently completing tasks and solving problems, it is understandable that the media sometimes treat crowdsourcing almost like a fairytale industry.

Recently, however, our friends at CrowdControl have begun to tear down our carefully cultivated air of magic and mystery with new research on the demographics of digital labor (I can handle losing a little mystique, but nobody better go anywhere near my special Microtask wizard’s hat). Some of the results do not make pleasant reading for traditional employers.

The research found that nearly 75% of those surveyed have a job outside of their Turk work and 21% perform tasks while at another job. Although this is a great way for workers to boost their pay packets while passing a boring afternoon, it is unlikely to be viewed enthusiastically by their employers. This trend will surely increase: the crowdsourcing industry is growing rapidly and nearly half of surveyed workers are between 26 and 35, with their whole working life ahead of them.

We, of course, do not see this as a major problem (assuming staff at Microtask are not doing it). But we are concerned about the reputation of our industry, and how distributed labor is perceived by the wider market. So what can companies do?

Unhappy endings from the past
One option is to try to cut off employees’ access to crowdsourcing platforms. This would, of course, be largely futile: with a smartphone and a 3G connection, workers can easily bypass the company connection (plus the thrill of doing something illicit may be an extra incentive to beat the system).

History suggests that trying to block access may be worse than futile. Back in the first days of Napster and the birth of illegal P2P file sharing, the music industry faced a similar dilemma, as its traditional revenue streams were threatened by technological progress. As we all know, the efforts of big record companies to resist progress were far from successful.

Let’s make a deal
A better idea would be to learn something from digital labor and judge employees by their results, not by the hours they spend at their desks staring into the void. Like those enlightened companies that have successfully implemented unlimited leave opportunities for staff, employers may find that if staff are treated like responsible adults, they just may just act like them, and get the job done even if they spend occasional down-time completing distributed tasks (or just playing Minesweeper).

Employers could even go a step further – like some of our customers are – and keep staff occupied all day by filling their down-time with distributed tasks. If employees are not thrilled by this prospect, they could be incentivized by additional pay for tasks completed. These tasks could be related to the company’s own in-house digital labor needs, or a third party’s.

The CrowdControl survey results may be fascinating, but they are not yet definitive, and any interpretation relies on a degree of speculation. However, as more research into digital labor is released, we are building a clearer picture of the dynamic, motivated workforce using new digital labor opportunities to achieve their goals outside traditional structures.

The big question is whether those traditional structures are flexible enough to cope with the changes that digital labor will bring. One thing’s for sure – as any music industry bigwig will tell you – it’s never a good idea to stand in the way of progress. If traditional employers want a happy ending, they should make sure they learn from the past.

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.