Brainstorming session 3

18 January 2010

More Brainstorming Notes

New idea:  Categorization Game – players are shown a picture of an object and must indicate "Where does it belong" either by typing in the answer or by clicking on a region of the map

-        What attributes might a person be able to discern from a picture of an object?

o   Identification (what is it)

o   Color

o   Size (relative)

o   Used for?

o   Where is it used?

o   Cost

o   Weight

o   What is it made of?

o   Shape

 

Categories of Problems (based on Crowdsourcing article)

-        Monetization

o   Pabst Brewing Company
o   MoveOn.org

-        Separate problem into chunks

o   uTest
o   Guardian newspaper
o   Design Bay
o   Texas border security

-        Finding an algorithm/Prediction

o   Netflix
o   Gold Mine

-        Idea Generation

o   FCC Broadband distribution
o   Cisco systems

-        Classification

o   ESP
o   Family Search
o   Galaxy Zoo
o   Emporis
o   reCaptcha
o   Stardust@Home

-        Use people to solve big problem

o   Amazon's Mechanical Turk
o   InnoCentive
o   Philoptima
o   Innovation Exchange

-        Adding Information

o   Katrina (lost people index)
o   Gold Mine
o   Wikipedia
o   OpenStreetMap

 

Three general/overarching categories of problems:

1)     Every person's solution matters in order to complete the solution
2)     Gather the best/optimal solution
3)     Everyone works toward one solution / get one solution from the entire crowd

Reclassifying all the above problems based on the three generic classes:

1)     Every person's solution matters in order to complete the solution

a.     Guardian
b.     Texas Border
c.     Wikipedia
d.     Katrina
e.     Amazon's Mech Turk
f.      ESP
g.     Galaxy Zoo
h.     Emporis
i.      reCaptcha
j.      Stardust@home
k.     Foldit

2)     Gather the best/optimal solution

a.     uTest
b.     Design Bay
c.     FCC
d.     CISCO

3)     Everyone works towards one solution/gets one solution from the entire crowd

a.     Netflix
b.     Surveying

 

Seven more specific ways of using people to:

• 1)     Build a knowledge base / contribute information (like Wikipedia)
• 2)     Choose and solve a problem from a pool of problems (like the Mechanical Turk)
• 3)     Contribute financially
• 4)     Test
• 5)     Solve a problem broken into chunks
• 6)     Contribute design / ideas / algorithms
• 7)     Classify / label

 

Contribute financially

• -        Game sponsored by an organization willing to donate money to charities based on game scores
• -        Donates to a different charity each day
• -        For each question answered correctly, a small amount of money ($0.01 for example) will be donated (similar to the rice game, where 10 grains of rice are donated for each question)
• -        Could be themed to the specific charity or cause each day to help people feel the importance

Testing

• -        Test translation software by seeing the before-processed text and after-processed text; the player indicates whether the translation is accurate or not (could also be applied to transcription software, players hear an audio clip and see the software-generated transcription, then they indicate whether the transcription is correct)
• -        Test a website for usability
• -        Test a "low-price" finder
• -        Test/review cameras by choosing the picture with the higher quality (players are shown two pictures of the same scene, taken by two different cameras; must then indicate which picture is better based on quality)

Breaking into chunks

• -        Weather prediction
• -        Astronomical classification (like Galazy Zoo or pulsar survey)
• -        Something that requires processing of massive amounts of data
• -        Classifying cultural traits  - Determine how aggressive people of a certain culture are
• -        What kind of Food the people like ? analyse the food habits of people.

-        New Idea: Build a survey framework to make survey taking fun, framework could be applied to all kinds of different surveys