Crowd sourcing

A good summary on the topic of how to build a crow-sourcing community: http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106563-crowdsourcing-systems-on-the-world-wide-web/fulltext#

A GoogleTalk from the founder of StackOverflow is very insightful: Learning from StackOverflow.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWHfY_lvKIQ&feature=relmfu

• Voting
• Tags
• Badges (earn badges)
• Karma (people are not going to do things for a small amount of money, people will do things for free) (you can get privileges)
• Performance
• Authentication: OpenID
• How many points do I have?

Also helpful for extending our schema are the descriptions of the stackoverflow tables: http://sqlserverpedia.com/wiki/Understanding_the_StackOverflow_Database_Schema

Relevance to crowdsourcing: http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2011/05/pay-enough-or-dont-pay-at-all.html

I found the results pretty interesting, with significant implications for micro-crowdsourcing. While volunteers may be great for various tasks (e.g., in citizen science applications, such as the Galaxy Zoo), migrating such applications to a paid crowdsourcing application may have a significant downside. Furthermore, with the low level of payments on Mechanical Turk, we essentially get stuck at the worst possible status. Not only we pay, but also we do not pay enough. But how can we pay more, when every attempt to increase the price to reasonable levels is followed by attempts of scammers to game the system and get paid for doing nothing?