Crowdsourcing Tedious Tasks for Fun and (Non)Profit
Computers are great at performing repetitive tasks, but they aren't perfect. Ask a computer to transcribe a podcast, re-write a sentence, or describe an image, and you'll get mixed results. But the result of these tasks can be incredibly important, so they still need to be done.
For example, double-checking assigned case closing codes in your program's case management system. You can't write a script. You need a person to read the notes and confirm the code--a mind-numbing task when you have to do hundreds of cases at a time. But in the end it's worth it. No legal aid director wants to fail their case audit and have to put together and execute a corrective action plan.
Other businesses and nonprofit organizations have similar tedious tasks that need to get done. Several are opting to crowdsource, or divide among many people in order to conquer, the tasks. The Sunlight Foundation's Transparency Corps project, launched yesterday (June 30, 2009), is an excellent example of this concept. Supporters can volunteer for less than five minutes to help make the federal government a bit more transparent.
Intrigued by the idea of online volunteering, I checked Transparency Corps out tonight. Currently, the public can either upload a picture in support of the Read the Bill campaign, which wants Congress to post bills online for at least 72 hours before considering them, or parsing some earmark requests to grow the Sunlight Foundation's earmark database. I opted to read earmarks.
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It turned out to be an easy, entertaining task. I quickly read through several earmarks, double-checking what was pre-entered into each of the fields and making corrections, if necessary. Not having much experience with earmarks, it was interesting to see where tax revenue is going. Most requests were for road and building improvements. One earmark was $1 million for the University of Alabama Domestic Violence Law Clinic. Of the thirty earmarks that I read, the most interesting was a request for funding to make a jail ADA compliant and buy tasers. (I'm certain that it makes sense to the person who needs the money, but it struck me as an odd mix.)
So what do you think? Are there tasks that the legal aid community might consider crowdsourcing? Could the Transparency Corps be a model for our community to follow? - K
Thanks for this post. I think translations could be done by groups. In particular for quality checks, a second translation back to English, to see if the translation stayed true to tone and register and did not omit or modify anything. Given that so many legal aids are struggling with how to meet the growing need for translated materials, there may be a way to create a collective, collaborate and allow the content to then be shared by those in the collective.
Claudia - That's a great idea. I did a quick search, and it looks like groups have already been experimenting with crowdsourcing translations. One example is TED (Technology, Education, and Design speeches from people "challenged to give the talk of their lives").
Also, it looks like Google is building on this idea and supplementing it with machine translation. What do you think of this idea? - K
Thanks for the great post about Transparency Corps. The code for Transparency Corps is open source so we encourage people to use it for their own projects. Translation sounds like an excellent way to use the crowds.
Again thanks for the kind words.
Nisha Thompson
Sunlight Foundation
Online Organizer
nthompson(at)sunlightfoundation(dot)com
Nisha - That's great! Could you share some information about how you planned and set up the project? What sort of staffing is needed to support the Transparency Corps project? - K
Kate,
I am a big fan of the TED conference and sometimes I wonder when and who in the public interest community they will/should invite to talk about the access gap and innovative ways to meet it. It has great videos of the presentations, and they are trully amazing experts sharing information in the most engaging ways. I wish we could meet some of those standards w/in our community. I'll see what they are doing on translation, b/c if TED is doing it, then it is a worthy project to explore.
I think machine translation, coupled with human review and editing, is a worthy approach, and it really depends on the audience targetted and the type of register the machine translation uses.