Chapter 14

Managing Your Crowd

In This Chapter

Using both analytical and human skills to manage

Making good choices when it comes to crowd members

Guiding and incentivising crowd members as they work

Spotting issues, and knowing when to quit

Dealing with disgruntled crowds

Crowdsourcing can be deceiving. After you understand the basic forms of crowdsourcing, you may quickly conclude that crowdsourcing is a simple activity. Identify a problem. Choose a platform. Write instructions. Listen to your crowd, in case it has something to say. Then the crowd solves your problem.

Indeed, crowdsourcing is a simple process. But like many simple processes, it requires a good manager, someone who can fit a complicated activity into the crowdsourcing mould and make the process work.

In this chapter, I look at how to manage and lead your crowd – how to guide the members towards your goals, how to detect problems before they occur, how to respect the crowd’s rights and how to deal with members of the crowd who are displeased with their work.

Starting with the Right Balance of Skills

Crowdsourcing management requires you to develop two sets of skills:

Analytical skills: These skills are for the parts of crowdsourcing that you can express in words, numbers or symbols. You identify your problem, shape it into a job that can be crowdsourced, describe it in a way that your crowd can understand, set the price, and release the job to the market. You can find more about these analytic skills in Chapters 10, 11, 12, 13, 14 and 16. If you don’t have these skills, you can’t even start to crowdsource.

Personal skills: Using these skills, you address the concerns of your co-workers who think that crowdsourcing’s a waste of time. You find a way of attracting a crowd to your project and convince the members to donate time, money or effort to your work or the work of your organisation. You calm the crowd when the tasks seem too hard, the deadline too short or the payment too low. Most importantly, you protect the reputation of your organisation and ensure that the crowd sees it as a good place to work. Without human skills, you may be able to start a crowdsourcing job, but you may not be able to finish it.

You need both analytical and personal skills to be a good manager of crowdsourcing. For example, you need to know the right steps for the job (analytical). But you also need to appreciate why some crowd members find the steps hard or illogical, and create a way to help those individuals learn the proper procedure (human).

To prepare to be a crowdsourcer, a manager of crowds, consider how to manage a volunteer activity such as a day-long project to clean a local park.

Start with the analytical skills you need for this clean-up project. Your analytical skills will help you set the basic plan for the project. You can identify the steps that the crowd needs to follow and the resources that it needs. Start by looking at the overall goal – cleaning the park – and by dividing that goal into tasks. These tasks are the things that the crowd needs to do in order to clean the park. Finally, link these tasks together to form a plan for the day.

If you don’t have the analytical skills to do these things, you get nothing done. A crowd of volunteers arrives at the park. The volunteers stand in a group gossiping and wondering who’s in charge. Eventually, everyone slopes off to the local café for a hot beverage and a pastry.

Even if you have a plan for cleaning the park, you still have to teach that plan to the group, which requires personal skill in addition to analytical skill. You have to show some people how to use a rake. You have to explain your method for collecting rubbish. You may even have to teach people how to cooperate. Sometimes you teach with words. Sometime you teach by demonstrating the right method. Sometimes you have to work alongside people for a while so that they can follow your example.

Finally, you have to spend much of the day handling the individual problems that would otherwise undermine the effort. You address the volunteer who’s refusing to work and shamelessly flirting with your assistant. You tame the complainer, who believes that the whole effort’s a waste of time. You gently redirect the officious volunteer who keeps bossing others. Finally, you make sure that all volunteers receive the compensation they want, whether that’s the gratitude of your organisation, a sense of doing good, a free lunch, or a chance to spend time with friends and neighbours.

You can see how you need both analytical and human skills to successfully manage a crowd. But the challenge of crowdsourcing is that you don’t have the advantage of being physically present with your crowd. You manage it at a distance using computer communication. That makes the human side of management trickier. You have to convey emotion and gauge the attitudes of the workers via online interactions. In addition, workers can feel isolated, not part of a team, not getting the attention that they need from their manager. To overcome this problem, you need to learn from your crowd (see Chapter 15).

You sometimes hear managers say that a worker started a job on the wrong foot, or workers claim that managers didn’t know what they wanted when they posted a job. Both of these statements show that good management needs to start at the beginning of a job. You’re on the short road to failure if you don’t have good analytical and human skills at the start. For example, you need to have a good description of your macrotask, or clear instructions for your microtasks, or a well-crafted statement for your crowdfunding campaign, or the appropriate criteria for your crowdcontest. (Chapter 11 contains all the info you need to prepare materials for guiding the crowd.)

Choosing the Right People

You demonstrate your skill as a manager when you make a good choice. If you’re uncomfortable choosing between workers, then you’re unlikely to be a good manager of crowds.

In both macrotasking and crowdcontests, you have to choose your workers. If you don’t attract people with the right skills, you won’t achieve the right result. Look at the accomplishments of the workers rather than just résumés of training, and hold a dialogue with those people who seem promising. You can give them an example and say ‘I need something like this’ or point to something that they’ve done and say ‘It should be something like that, only slightly different.’

In microtasking, the selection process is a little less important, because you’re free to reject the work of any individual. Still, you can easily find that you’re regularly getting wrong results from the same person. You can send that worker a friendly note saying that he may want to stop trying to do your tasks and find work elsewhere.

When selecting members of your crowd, you’re looking for people with the right skills. Don’t be tempted to accept low quality because you’ve not mastered the skills yourself! Crowdsourcing should expand the skills that you have at your disposal. For example, you may have a project that needs a database. Because you don’t understand databases, you decide to ask for a spreadsheet, which is a technology you better understand. At the end, you may still have a project that met at least some of your goals. However, the result was limited by you, not by the crowd.

When you’re preparing a job for macrotasking or a crowdcontest that you don’t completely understand, engage the crowd through questions that help educate you. Ask:

Do you see any problems with this project?

Is there anything that’ll keep you from meeting the deadline?

Is there anything that’ll keep you from meeting the budget?

Is there a simpler way to do this project?

What are the benefits of your way instead of the simpler way?

Managing the Crowd Through the Project

You’ve chosen a crowd and you’ve made a commitment to the project. If you stop now, you have to admit that something was wrong, that the project didn’t work. Sometimes, you want to accept that conclusion and quit. However, you generally try to manage the project to a successful conclusion. Here’s how.

Using a consistent voice

In any form of project management, you generally want to have a single manager. Nothing causes your project to fail faster than two, three or four voices giving directions about the project and confusing the crowd. The workers become frustrated because they don’t know what to do. You become frustrated because the crowd isn’t making progress.

Crowdsourcing management is a little different from traditional project management. In traditional project management, you identify a single person as the manager. In crowdsourcing, where most of the directions are given through electronic communications, you’re looking for a single, consistent voice. You can have many people giving commands, but they need to speak with one voice.

If you’re using a crowdsourcing platform, you have an electronic record of all communications with the crowd. If you’re the only manager, you can use that record to make sure that your own communications are consistent. (Or if you need to change your mind, you can explain why you’re making the change.) If many people are managing the crowd, they can use that record to make sure they speak with one voice.

In crowdfunding, you often achieve substantial benefits from having multiple people handling the project. All managers can pull their friends and social networks into the crowd. However, this core of managers should give consistent messages to the crowd. Because you can keep an electronic record of their correspondence, you can avoid the problem of having one leader claiming that you’re raising money to save the whales, another stating that you’re saving penguins, and a third alleging that neither whales nor penguins are the issue and that you’re protecting polar bears instead. (Chapter 6 will help you understand how to communicate for crowdfunding.)

Keeping in touch

Regularly correspond with your crowd. If you don’t, you’re apt to find that your original ideas have drifted substantially and that the crowd’s working towards something that’s quite different from what you believe you’re getting. You can ask for updates, look at intermediate results, let the group know what you’re thinking, and solicit feedback.

If you start a regular pattern of communicating with the crowd, you’re better able to control the crowd members’ anxiety should things start to fall apart. If you have a history of communicating with the crowd, the members are less likely to be bothered by thinking that you’re checking up on them. Members will be used to you communicating with them and so won’t feel concerned by any questions you ask seeking information about how the job is going or by you wanting to look at their intermediate results.

Communicating across cultures

When you crowdsource, you can usually limit your crowd to people from your own culture. You can have a Portuguese crowd if you live in Brazil, a German crowd if you live in Germany, an English crowd if you live in the UK. However, you may get more skills, more points of view or more work if you have an international crowd.

When crowdsourcing fails, you usually find failed communications at the heart of it. If you’re working with an international crowd, it’s better to be complete than be concise. Don’t assume that the crowd understands the underlying assumptions of the work. Don’t assume that the crowd will fill in the gap between steps in your instructions. If you have any doubts, write down your ideas in complete detail. You’re more likely to create a successful project if you have too many words than if you have too few.

If you’re not sure whether the crowd understands your descriptions, ask the members to put the instructions into their words. (This procedure works best for macrotasking and crowdcontests.) If the workers just return your words, you should take that as a sign that you’re in trouble. If they can’t produce a good restatement of what you want, consider ending the project.

Giving feedback

Build trust with the crowd by giving concrete feedback:

Positive feedback: Tell them ‘This work is great! Keep up the good work,’ not something long-winded and less concrete in tone like ‘I’ve been reviewing the work from the past few days and comparing it with what you’ve done before, and comparing it with the original description that I posted six months ago, and have concluded that the work is good.’ Give positive feedback promptly.

Negative feedback: Don’t dive in. Wait a while to give the workers a chance to brace themselves for bad news (if they get bad news too quickly, they’re likely to reject it out of hand). Don’t say anything sharp or too pointed, such as, ‘What were you thinking? Your work was rubbish. Begone and never darken my crowdsourcing door again.’ Word your comments to soften the blow: ‘I’ve been reviewing the work from the past few days and comparing it with what you’ve done before, and comparing it with the original description that I posted six months ago. I’ve concluded that a quality problem exists, but it’s one that you should be able to fix for the future.’ Then go on to give concrete details of the issue and the fix required.

Tracking milestones

When you work in crowdsourcing, you soon find that milestones – intermediate goals – are useful both to you and to the crowd. However, the crowdsourcer and the crowd tend to use milestones in slightly different ways.

As a crowdsourcer, you use milestones as a way of checking your plans. Each time your project approaches an intermediate goal, you can check to see whether the work’s going well, whether you have enough resources to complete the task, or whether you need to make new plans for the job.

When you set milestones for the crowd, however, you use them as a means of motivating the workers, and of getting the crowd to concentrate on the overall goal of the job and on the value of each individual contribution.

You can clearly see how to use intermediate goals to motivate the crowd by looking at a crowdfunding example. (See Chapter 6 for more information about crowdfunding.) At the outset of a crowdfunding campaign, the crowd can believe that it has plenty of time to meet the goals. For example, if you’re trying to raise $12,000 (£7,560) in eight weeks, you’re likely to face a crowd that isn’t particularly motivated to contribute a share. Individual members of the crowd will look at the final deadline and conclude that it’s a long time in the future and that you don’t really need their contributions, at least not yet.

If you examine how contributions are usually made in a crowdfunding drive, you’ll find that they don’t come in a neat, orderly fashion. Instead, you’ll see that one-eighth are contributed by the end of the first week, one-quarter by the end of the second week, half by the end of the fourth, and three-quarters by the end of the sixth. People tend to give money in a rush just before deadlines arrive.

To motivate the crowd throughout the course of an eight-week crowdfunding campaign, you can easily set three obvious intermediate goals: to raise one-quarter of the funds at two weeks, a half at four, and three-quarters at six weeks. At each of the intermediate goals, you remind the crowd of the campaign’s goal and of how to contribute to the project. ‘We need to raise $6,000 by the end of this week,’ you tell them. ‘On average, we have to raise $215 each day.’ At the end, you tell each member of crowd that his contribution was important and that it’ll make a difference.

The lesson you can learn from such a campaign can apply to every form of crowdsourcing: you set intermediate goals not only to give you an idea of how the work is progressing, but also to remind the crowd members that every individual effort is important and to encourage them to work on the job. You can easily use this technique when you microtask (see Chapter 10 for ways to promote your project, and Chapter 16 for more ideas about workflows), and you can also find ways of using intermediate goals to encourage the crowd in other forms of crowdsourcing, too.

Giving the crowd space to work

Although you generally find that you do a better job of managing the crowd by communicating with the crowd, you want to avoid being a hovering boss, a manager who’s not giving the crowd the opportunity to work on its own. You may find it difficult to distinguish between when you’re merely paying attention to an important project and when you’re probing too deeply into the process and making the crowd resentful.

Of course, each crowd has its qualities, and each manager is unique. Still, a few ideas can help you find the right balance between being a responsible manager and hovering boss:

Ask for information at regular intervals (such as weekly) or at natural intervals in the project.

Let some of your messages be merely social: ‘Saw that you were working on the project today, and thought I’d say hello.’

Ask the crowd for information rather than demanding it: ‘Saw that you were working today. Any news?’

Respecting Workers’ Rights

In dealing with your workers, you can prevent much trouble by remembering that they’re human beings and they have rights. Professional crowdsourcing companies offer their workers a statement of rights. Most of these statements cover common points:

Respectful treatment: Be prompt in answering any correspondence from workers. Treat all workers equally. Focus only on issues involving work, not issues involving personal background or personal opinion, even if the worker raises such issues. Make correspondence with workers dispassionate, even if your lack of passion makes the letter seem a little less personal.

Prompt payment: Establish a payment policy for the workers and display that policy on your site. (Usually, you link to this kind of policy statement from a page that describes your activity, such as the ‘About Us’ page and from the page you use to recruit members of the crowd.) The statement should say how you review work, how much time it’ll take for work to be accepted, and the maximum amount of time required for payments to be processed. Workers don’t like uncertainty. They prefer jobs that give a clear timeline for payments. They also like crowdsourcers who make payments quickly. (See the following section for more about paying workers.)

Transparent judgements when work is rejected: Every worker expects rejection from time to time. These rejections are common points of dispute between workers and the crowdsourcer. You can eliminate most of these disputes and simplify the others if you have a policy that all jobs are judged in an open way and that when you reject jobs, you give a clear reason that’s directly connected to the description of the job or the job instructions.

Right to appeal: If a worker has a job rejected, he has the right to appeal that decision. In general, you may find it worthwhile to have an independent person, an ombudsman, handle the appeal. If you’re working with a large crowdsourcing service, you may find that it has an ombudsman who can take appeals. In an open appeal system, you restate the reason why the work was rejected or the person banned, and ask the worker to address that reason. Usually, any appeal judgement is final.

A well-designed appeal system helps uncover problems in the work, such as poorly written instructions or a badly conceived goal. When you receive an appeal, start by asking yourself, ‘How will this help me make my crowdsourcing better?’ This question usually helps you approach the appeal with a more open mind and often makes the appeal process less contentious.

Keeping on Top of the Details: Payroll and Accounting

Behind many of the fundamental rights of workers are the practices of good accounting. Workers should be able to review the records that track how much they work and how much they’ve been paid.

In most countries, you’re required to report the earnings of the crowd to the national taxation authority, such as Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in the UK or the Internal Revenue Service in the USA. To support the figures that you give the tax authorities, you need to keep track of the number of jobs or hours worked by each member of the crowd. In some cases, you may be responsible for paying certain kinds of taxes, such as payroll taxes. If you use a crowdsourcing platform (see Chapter 12), however, you’ll find that it usually provides payroll, record and taxation services.

If you’re unfamiliar with the requirements in your country, consult with someone who’s able to advise you properly, such as a Certified Public Accountant in the USA or a Chartered Accountant in the UK. In both countries, you can find payroll specialists who understand the legal and technical issues of payrolls. In the USA, they’re called Certified Payroll Professionals. In the UK, they’re Payroll Professionals.

Unless you crowdsource for an organisation that operates a payroll operation, using a payroll service to pay your workers is a good idea. These services keep records, report income to the appropriate offices and help you pay any taxes that you need to pay. You can use almost any payroll service that caters for small businesses. Many of the major crowdsourcing platforms have payroll services that you can use even if you don’t use their platform for crowdsourcing.

Incentivising to Build Quality

You can use money to attract workers to the market, but you can’t always use it to encourage the crowd to work well. A higher reward may encourage better submissions for crowdcontests, but it doesn’t necessarily give a macrotasker more skill or encourage a microtasker to spend more time on the job and devote more effort to checking the product. To improve the quality of work, you can reward best practice and be inspired by gamification – creating a fun, challenging game out of crowdsourcing.

You can reward best practices and use gamification incentives in all forms of crowdsourcing, but they’re often associated with microtasking.

Rewarding best practices

You can often improve the quality of your work by putting it in the hands of workers. The workers often identify the strategies that complete the job in the least amount of time and produce the fewest problems. You can discover these strategies by encouraging your workers to blog about their approach to work. (Think of the blog as an online suggestions box.) You can review the blog, test ideas, reward the best ones and encourage other workers to adopt the good practice through a page that identifies workers who submit good ideas. You might award a badge each month to the best contributors (see the Awarding badges section later in this chapter) or even offer a cash award for the for the best suggestion for each job.

To test an idea, you use it to modify the instructions or training material for your job and then allow only part of the crowd to complete the job with the new materials. When this part of the crowd has competed its tasks, you compare the work with the tasks completed using the old methods. You can then see whether the new materials helped the workers complete the work more quickly or with fewer problems.

You can’t always require workers to do the work in a specific way. However, the ideas from a good blog help you improve the quality of your crowdsourcing. You can promote best practices, incorporate them into your training materials, and use them in your instructions. For more on improving your crowdsourcing, head to Chapter 15.

Taking inspiration from gamification

Many crowdsourcers have attempted to turn their crowdsourcing platforms into systems that resemble video games. They call this process gamification. The crowdsourcers claim that they’ll someday produce a system in which transcribing a business record will be as much fun as navigating through a maze, finding organisational data will be as engaging as finding hidden treasures, and categorising tweets will have all the excitement of killing enemy soldiers.

At the moment, no one has produced a crowdsourcing platform that’s as entertaining as a video game. A few have created games that are similar to the educational programs we give to children. These platforms may present crowdsourcing in slightly more interesting ways, but they can never completely hide the fact that the activity’s a form of work. Still, even if you can’t turn crowdsourcing into a game, you can at least use some of the incentives that games use.

Awarding badges

You can identify and reward through the use of badges or honorary titles. These badges are both symbolic and practical. They make a worker feel accomplished and appreciated. They also can be incorporated into the worker’s reputation. A worker can quickly summarise his accomplishments by reporting that he’s earned a silver badge on one job, two gold stars on another, and a rare platinum badge on a third.

The Old Weather Project on the Zooniverse crowdsourcing platform gives badges to workers who’ve completed a certain amount of work. These badges are named after the ranks in the British Navy. You start as a cadet. You get a lieutenant’s badge when you’ve transcribed 30 records. The top badge is that of captain, which is given to the person who’s transcribed the most records for a single ship.

You can also use badges to reward quality of work. These badges tend to be more subjective than badges awarded for the quantity of work. You can make them concrete and more effective by tying them to quantity. In a crowdcontest, for example, you can offer a silver star to the submission that you judge to be the best submission you’ve seen in ten contests. In microtasking, you may award a gold star to someone who’s completed 50 tasks with at least 45 of them being done correctly.

Encourage the workers to take your badges seriously by offering a small financial reward for each. Most workers view the badges as an honour, and they see the financial reward as representing that honour.

You can use the badges to identify workers who are more efficient, more reliable or more skilled. In addition to giving them recognition or cash rewards, you give them access to special classes of jobs, jobs that may be more sophisticated or offer higher compensation.

Posting to the leaderboard

In addition to badges, you can use a leaderboard – a computer screen that shows the identities of the top ten workers. Generally, you use a leaderboard to reward quantity, so you show the identities of workers who’ve completed the largest number of tasks today, this week, this month, or on this job.

Leaderboards can encourage competition within a certain group of the workers. Some workers review the leaderboard and do the work that keeps them on the board or at the top of the board. You may also give the best results if you offer small cash prizes to the workers who are at the top of the leaderboard. You can offer a prize to those who are at the top of the board at the end of the day, the end of the week, or the end of the project (or another reasonable period).

Leaderboards are especially useful for large jobs, because they encourage competition within the crowd. As deadlines draw near, you can publicise the board and even offer a special reward for those people who do the most work.

As with badges, you can use a leaderboard to identify workers who’ve done the highest quality of work. In microtasking, you can recognise the people who’ve completed tasks with the least number of errors. To encourage workers to do more tasks, you can set the minimum number of tasks required for workers to be on the board. Each week, you can raise the number to encourage the best workers to add their effort to the job.

Recognising Trouble

Everyone makes mistakes. You start a project that quickly becomes an adventure that you didn’t anticipate. The work is too hard. It takes too long. The results aren’t those that you want. You can redouble your efforts and try to get the best that you can from the job, or you can go back to the beginning and start the work in a different way. As you manage your crowdsourced project, you need to keep assessing the situation and asking whether you should continue the job or stop the work and resort to a different approach.

Knowing your options

When you’re doing an important job, one that’s crucial to your success or that has to be done by an immovable deadline, you should always review other methods that you might use to do the work and ask whether those methods may not be easier or less risky. Consider whether you’d be more likely to get a good result if you hired a full-time employee to do the job or contracted with a conventional firm to do it. As a good manager and a good crowdsourcer, you owe it to yourself to make the best decision.

Say that you’re trying to design a smartphone app through macrotasking. As the job starts, you begin to sense trouble. You start to think that your worker may not be creating the kind of program you want. If you look at your options, you may conclude that you can:

Correspond with the worker to see whether you can clarify the work. You should correspond if you believe that your job may be going astray. You have little additional cost and are likely to see improvement or get a better understanding of your worker’s ability to complete the job as you intended.

Stop the project, revise the job description, and then give it to your current worker. In talking with your worker, you may conclude that you need to stop the project and rewrite the description. If you do that, you’re admitting that the project was flawed at the start and that you bear some of the responsibility. You certainly have to pay the worker for the work done. You also need to work out whether you want to continue with your current worker or return to the crowdmarket and get a worker who’s a better fit for your job.

Stop the project, go back to the crowdmarket, and give the job to another worker. You’ve decided that the problems lie with the crowdworker. But will a change of worker justify the cost of the switch? You probably have to pay the first worker for the work already done, because you chose to hire that individual. (You can withhold payment only if the worker doesn’t seem to have the skills suggested in his portfolio or if your crowdsourcing platform has a policy that allows you to withhold payment for mediocre work.) In addition, you have to take the time to review the portfolios of other workers, choose a new worker, and develop a new relationship with that worker.

If you return to the crowdmarket, set a higher price for your job to make it more attractive and engage a higher skilled worker who can get it done more quickly.

Stop the project and give it to a full-time worker. Taking this route may be easier or harder, cheaper or more costly, depending on the people who may be available for you to hire. If you’ve no one who can do that work, you have to hire someone, train him and get him involved in your project. In that case, you’ll find this alternative quite expensive. You should choose it only if you feel that you have no alternative.

Computing the price of failure

For many jobs, you base your decision to stop or continue on the cost of failure rather than the cost of change. If the cost of failure is high, and if it’ll result in lost revenue or lost alternatives, make sure that you’ve as many alternatives as possible. You generally have such alternatives in a conventional organisation, although you don’t always see them. If a conventional employee is unable to complete a job, you usually have the alternatives of reassigning the work to others, bringing in temporary workers or asking for help from other divisions.

If you’re crowdsourcing a critical job, you may want to plan to have extra alternatives from the start: you crowdsource the same job to multiple workers or teams, or you keep part of a conventional staff ready to pick up the work.

Treating the cause, not the symptom

As you review your options, you want to determine the root cause of the problem.

Say you notice that your crowdworker isn’t spending much time on his macrotasking job. You conclude that you have the wrong worker, and ditch him. But changing workers doesn’t solve the issue. The next worker doesn’t do much work either. You quiz the second worker and discover that not only does he not really understand the job, but he thinks you’ve underpriced the work. Ah ha! Now you know the actual issues.

Sometimes, you find that the root cause is a fundamental flaw in the job. The job doesn’t neatly fit into a crowdsourcing framework because it can’t be split between multiple workers, or it requires more knowledge than a single worker may have, or it requires a history with your organisation that can’t be found in any independent individual. In such cases, you have only one option: stop the job and reconsider your plans.

Stopping a Project

The decision to quit a crowdsourcing job isn’t an easy one to take, especially if you’re new to the field and are still learning how to handle the crowd. My advice is that when you realise that you need to halt a project, get moving. If you delay or drift, you’re unlikely to make the situation any better.

Exiting firmly and gracefully

Act firmly. Notify the crowdsourcing platform of your decision and ask about any consequences. You may be responsible for payments for the time already spent on the job. You may also have to notify the crowd.

When you notify the crowd, follow the kinds of rules you use for dealing with personnel issues. Be clear. Be polite. Stick to the facts. Say only what you need to say. Avoid emotion. Remember, you may need to start a new crowdsourced job and you don’t want to do anything that unnecessarily damages your reputation.

Protecting your intellectual property

When you stop a job, think about any intellectual property that the crowd may have created for you, such as sketches of designs, code for an app, and the storyboard for a video.

Commercial crowdsourcing platforms generally have a policy that you have to follow (you agree to this when you sign up – so check it before you start a job!). Depending on the policy, you have four options:

Keep all the intellectual property and use it as you see fit.

Keep all the intellectual property but don’t use it in public.

The crowdworkers keep any property they created but can’t use it publically in any way that’s connected to you.

The crowdworkers keep any property and can reuse it in any way.

If you keep the intellectual property, you usually have to pay for the work done. If you don’t keep the material, you may or may not have to pay for the partial work.

Be concerned about the reuse of intellectual property only if the material can be traced to your organisation or if you want to base further work on the ideas. In creative crowdsourcing, the crowd often wants to try to reuse ideas that weren’t acceptable to a client. The workers won’t want you to use ideas that they’ve created if they think they’ve not been fully compensated for these ideas.

When Crowds Attack: Dealing with Angry Crowds

Crowdsourcing jobs, like any other form of human relationship, can end badly. When you let a crowdworker go from your project, or you end a project prematurely, he may feel angry or wronged. As a result, he may want to hurt you or your organisation. Just as fired workers may try to disrupt the office they’re leaving, terminated crowdworkers may try to attack your organisation in the arena where they work: the Internet.

Most commonly, crowds express their anger by posting claims about your alleged misdeeds and maltreatment to blogs and Twitter accounts and other forms of social media. In most cases, the crowd quickly loses interest and lets the issue fade into the deep recesses of cyberspace.

In other cases, the crowd members pursue their perceived grievances further, and you need to take action. In the most extreme cases, the workers may try to mount a cyber-attack against your computer systems or even attack you physically. (One commercial crowdsourcing platform, which I’ll call CrowdCorp.net, reported that it had to briefly guard its offices when a fired crowdworker threatened to come to the company’s office and do bodily harm to the officers and managers.)

Assessing the situation

When crowds attack, first assess the situation. Review the case to be sure that you understand the circumstances that have led the crowd to attack. Commonly, you find that the problem’s based on the grievances of a single individual. Start with that assumption, look for the event that caused the attack, and try to address it.

Make sure that the case doesn’t point to a bigger problem in your crowdsourcing effort. Instead of addressing a single worker who’s angry over his experience, you may be facing the first person who’s willing to talk about a problem that affects many of your workers. Even if you find that the problem starts with a single worker, check with other workers to see whether they’ve the same kind of experience.

If you suspect that you may have a bigger problem, have an online town meeting or other activity that allows you to address a large group of workers. Be prepared that the first reaction of the workers may not be pleasant. Often town meetings follow a pattern that builds to an emotional climax before the group calms, starts to express itself rationally, and gives you useful information.

Handling a discontented worker

If the uprising is caused by a single worker, you can usually identify the individual. You often find a chain of emails or tweets pointing to that person.

Even if you can’t identify the single worker who started the attack, perhaps because he’s hidden behind an alias, try to reach that individual through a mass email or tweet or some other form of communication. You may get responses from more than one person, but you may also get the chance to listen to the crowd and bring the incident under control.

Addressing the individual

Meetings with discontented individuals can often be tense or emotional. They can be especially challenging when conducted over the Internet, where you’re not face to face. However, you may need to hold such a meeting to try to resolve the situation.

Always approach such meetings calmly. Keep focused on the key issue: removing an objection that’s interfering with your organisation’s ability to crowdsource. Don’t take any remark personally. (Harder said than done, to be sure, but you have to try.) Always identify the problem and ask the worker, ‘What can we do to fix this problem?’

Some problems seem trivial. Individuals identify tiny slights that are of symbolic importance to them – for example, payment delays of a day or two. Indeed, payment complaints are common. But, generally, as long as payments are consistent with the market, they usually aren’t the central problem. Usually, the key problem is a perception of management. The worker feels that he’s not been treated well.

Determine whether the problem’s with your crowdsourcing work or merely an event with one individual. If something’s wrong with your crowdsourcing, address it, but be careful about promising that the problem will never happen again, as workers sometimes request. At best, you can promise to be open to the workers and ready to fix problems as they occur.

If you have any concern about who (other than you and the crowdworker) may be following the discussion or who may also be able to read emails or postings, conduct the meeting over the phone. In meetings with angry personnel, you may say things to try to address the problem that may easily be read out of context and by other people in ways that you didn’t intend.

If you do try to address the problem over email or another text-based form of communication, write as if your emails will eventually become public. Always treat the other person respectfully. Never threaten or make promises that you don’t intend to keep.

If the problem looks as if it’s going to expand – or worse, if the problem’s expanding already – seek professional advice. Because your relationship with the crowd involves human workers, you may find that you can’t say some things publically. You may also find that you have legal means of addressing the problem.

Protecting your crowdsourcing

When you’re dealing with a disgruntled individual, always remember that you’re trying to protect your crowdsourcing project and your ability to crowdsource. You don’t want a solution that hurts that process, even if that solution proves that you acted properly in the design and management of your crowdsourcing.

From time to time, you may face an attack that’s driven by an unjustified complaint. For example, a worker claims that he was fired from the project without a good cause and starts a campaign against you on the Internet. You know that this individual submitted completely fraudulent work, or work stolen from others, or nothing at all. You may even have the evidence to show the poor quality of the work. You need to look for a way to bring the problem to a close, stop the attack, and cause the worker to go away.

If the worker has evidence that may be interpreted as showing bad management on your part, you may have to negotiate a solution that gives a partial payment to the worker in exchange for an end to the attack. You certainly don’t want to start your discussions with this option, but you may want to consider it as you talk with the worker.

If you have to negotiate a solution, you may want to insist that neither you nor the worker admit fault. You may also want a lawyer to draft a formal agreement.

Recognising structural problems

In assessing the situation, you may find a number of structural problems, problems that have developed because of the way in which you organised the crowd. The most common problems are rooted in communications issues. You may find that the instructions were misleading or confusing. However, you can also find a number of other problems that may have caused the worker to start the attack. These problems can include:

Delayed payments

Inappropriate communications to the crowd

Inappropriate or changed deadlines

Inappropriate tools (software or file formats) for the job

Misleading promotional material for the project

Modifications to the project

To help identify structural problems, start by reviewing the other chapters in this part of the book, notably Chapters 10, 13, and 14. These chapters describe what you need to do to communicate with the crowd and guide its actions.

When you find a structural problem, you usually have two options. You can either try to fix the problem and continue with the work, or stop the job and restart it from the beginning. In either case, you’re likely to have to pay for work that’s been done improperly. In the first case, when you’re trying to finish a partially complete job, you usually have to accept the blame for the problem. You don’t need to beat yourself up in public, but you do need to say ‘The problem seems to have been in the way I organised the job. I’ve attempted to correct the mistake, and I hope that we can get the job done quickly.’

Managing the public relations problem

When it comes to crowdsourcing, reputation matters. If crowdworkers conclude that you’re crowdsourcing in ways that are difficult for them or that put them at a disadvantage, they’ll seek work elsewhere and may even seek higher payments for your jobs.

If the attack looks like nothing more than an isolated email to you or tweet to the world at large, you may choose to be patient, review the case, and let the storm pass. However, if the crowd looks as if it intends to keep the attack going, you need to take action.

Follow these three fundamental rules of public relations:

Keep ahead of the story. If someone’s spreading stories about you or your organisation on the Internet, you want your side of the story presented clearly and accurately. You don’t want others to define the issues, the conflict or the facts. Make sure that your perspective is visible to those who are attacking you and to their audience. Make them respond to you rather than you to them.

Don’t let bad news dribble into the public domain. Make sure that you know the full story of the situation, including details of all events or communications that may reflect badly on you or your organisation. Once you know the facts, get them on your website, and handle them. You don’t want to face a publication relations problem in which bad facts are dribbling onto the Internet. Bad news leaking out over time suggests that there actually is a story behind the problem that reflects badly on you. Let the bad news get to the public quickly.

Separate ego from business. Even if you’re completely without fault, you can never convince everyone that you’re in the right. Of course, do the best you can to present your side of the story, but remember that your first goal is to protect your organisation and allow it to work effectively in the future.