Chapter 13

Picking Your Platform

In This Chapter

Knowing how a platform helps you

Seeing which platform works for your project

Considering a platform’s crowds, support and policies

Looking at different platforms’ offerings

You think that you’re ready to start crowdsourcing. You have an idea and a plan. For your next step, you need to choose a platform. The platform is a website, a crowdmarket and an organisation of people who can help you to crowdsource. When you use a crowdsourcing platform, you’re not alone. You have a group of people who understand crowdsourcing and who are ready and waiting to help you.

A crowdsourcing platform isn’t absolutely essential in order to crowdsource. Chapter 12 shows how you can crowdsource with social media, and you can crowdsource from a private web page if you like. If you have a desire to do things from first principles, you can even crowdsource from a busy street corner with nothing more than a clipboard and a booming voice. In some cases, crowdsourcing without using a formal crowdsourcing platform makes sense. You can search for macrotaskers on craigslist, for example, or publicise a fundraising campaign on Facebook.

In many cases, however, the assistance and support that a formal crowdsourcing platform can give you is invaluable. Crowdsourcing can involve a lot of details. You have to make a formal agreement with a macrotasker or qualify all the microtaskers, and you have to file tax information for your fundraising. You can easily forget some of these details or simply make a mistake. Crowdfunding platforms help you handle all those details and make sure that you’re crowdsourcing well.

By any reasonable count, the number of crowdsourcing platforms is in the thousands and is growing rapidly. Crowdsourcing platforms aren’t interchangeable. Each does a better job supporting certain kinds of work, and a poorer job of handling others. Just as you can’t do all your home repairs with a screwdriver, so you can’t do every kind of crowdsourcing on a single platform. So, in this chapter I give plenty of guidance on how to choose a platform, covering all the areas you need to consider.

Getting the Benefits of a Platform

When you use a crowdsourcing platform, you’re not merely buying access to a crowdmarket or engaging an intermediary between you and the crowd. You’re gaining the benefits of expertise, an expertise that will simplify your crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing platforms generally give you five benefits:

Means to raise a crowd

Access to crowdsourcing expertise

Ability to use standard forms of crowdsourcing

Help with bookkeeping

Reduced risk of failure

Of course, crowdsourcing platforms aren’t universal solutions to all problems, and they have their drawbacks:

They can lock you into a fixed form of crowdsourcing. You start the job thinking you’re doing one form of crowdsourcing, and realise that you should’ve done it another way.

They may direct you towards a crowd that doesn’t have the expertise you need.

They may not be able to handle all the labour issues that are present in your country or jurisdiction.

They add an additional expense to crowdsourcing.

Some people resist using a crowdsourcing platform, because of the additional cost. In many, many cases, such crowdsourcers are being penny-wise and pound-foolish. The costs of a crowdsourcing platform are usually small compared with the benefits. Just as few individuals would create their own word-processing program in order to write a book, so very few people should crowdsource without the support of a strong crowdsourcing platform.

Raising the crowd

Without a platform, the hardest part of crowdsourcing is raising the right crowd. You turn to crowdsourcing because you need some additional skill and you usually don’t have an easy way to get that skill. If you’re in an organisation, you have no one in your group who possesses that skill. If you’re an individual, you have no idea where you might find someone who has the skills you need.

Crowdsourcing platforms, though, come with crowds. Since crowdsourcing platforms handle the work of many crowdsourcers, they have many jobs to offer. Hence they offer steady work for the crowd and attract a group of workers who like the jobs on the platform. So when you choose a crowdsourcing platform, you’re also choosing a ready-made crowd.

Of course, the crowd at the crowdsourcing platform may not be sufficient for your work. You may have to supplement the crowd with people you recruit through social media (see Chapter 12), your employees or your friends. Most commonly, supplementing the crowd of the crowdsourcing platform is done in crowdfunding, where you almost always know people who can contribute to your cause or encourage others to contribute. You’ll want to bring these people to your crowd. (See Chapter 6 for more on crowdfunding.) Even in situations where you do have to supplement the crowd, the crowdsourcing platform still gives you a crowd with which to start your project. After all, it’s better to start with some kind of a crowd than with no crowd at all.

Knowing what other people know

Experience brings skill. Crowdsourcing may be easy to do, but each crowdsourcer – especially a newbie – has lessons to learn. When you work with a crowdsourcing platform, you generally have access to people who’ve done crowdsourcing before and can help you avoid basic mistakes.

First, most platforms have staff that help you prepare your job and post it on the platform. You usually reach the staff through a customer relations button on the platform. Sometimes, the staff contact you as soon as you create an account. On crowdfunding platforms, the staff show you how to present your project in the best possible light. On macrotasking platforms, they show you how to organise your job, how to assign a price to the work and how to choose a well-qualified worker.

Often, you can contact other crowdsourcers who’ve used the site and want to share their experience. Sometimes, you talk with these crowdsourcers through forums or blogs supported by the crowdsourcing platform. In many cases, you can read case studies by these crowdsourcers and contact the crowdsourcers directly. In some cases, you can contact crowdworkers through forms or blogs. The crowdworkers can tell which jobs are good and which aren’t, which ideas work and which don’t.

Using standardised crowdsourced services

Sometimes you want to do the kinds of things that crowdsourcing can do, but you don’t want to crowdsource. Perhaps you want someone to clean your data or tag photographs, transcribe records or test a mobile app, but you certainly don’t want to design a task, write a description of the work, find a platform or raise a crowd. What you want, then, is a standardised crowdsourced service, which does those things for you, rather than a crowdsourcing platform, where you do them yourself.

Many companies offer standardised crowdsourced services, although they may not explicitly advertise them as being crowdsourcing. Whereas in the past, people searched for standardised crowdsourced services by conducting an Internet search for ‘crowdsourcing’, you now search for the specific service you require. Indeed, you may never be told that the service is actually a form of crowdsourcing.

Here are some examples of standardised services. (Most standardised crowdsourcing services are applications of microtasking (see Chapter 8), although a few are forms of macrotasking (see Chapter 7).)

Microtasking-based:

• Transcription services, including the transcription of medical records

• Sales contact generation and similar activities

• Translation services

• Search engine optimisation of websites

• Tagging and photographic description

Macrotasking-based:

• All kinds of general office work

• Website development

• Mobile app development

• Software testing

If you're especially interested in trying crowdsourced-based versions of these services, you can find a list of them in the Crowd Labor section of the directory at crowdsourcing.org (www.crowdsourcing.org/directory).

If you’re doing a crowdsourcing task that fits neatly into one of these standard services, using one of the standardised crowdsourcing platforms is easier than doing the job of crowdsourcing yourself. And, importantly, you’re more likely to succeed if you fit your work into a standardised form of crowdsourcing than if you try to develop an entirely new form. When you use a standardised form of crowdsourcing, you know that it’s been tested and that the crowd generally already understands how the process works.

Using a standardised crowdsourcing service usually leaves you with little to do. You give your job description and details of any data you need to the appropriate crowdsourcing platform. The platform then takes your job, makes any adjustments that are needed, gives the job to its crowd, and returns the results to you.

For example, say you have a large database that has duplicate records, missing information and, in some cases, contradictory information, and you need to have it cleaned. To do this job, you identify a crowdsourcing data cleaning service, give it the web address of your database and details of the work that you need done on the data. The service then prepares the crowdsourcing job and gives you a cleaned database.

Standardised crowdsourcing services tend to be a little more expensive than standard crowdsourcing platforms that require you to prepare the job and review the results. Still, they’re usually much less expensive than the conventional ways of performing these services, ways that may involve big organisations and full-time employees. Many of the platforms that provide standardised services don’t actually advertise that they undertake crowdsourcing jobs. They just emphasise the services that they provide and how the services are less expensive than other ways of doing the work.

You can find standard forms of any form of crowdsourcing. Standard ways have developed of doing microtasking, macrotasking, crowdfunding and crowdcontests. You even have standard ways of managing self-organised crowds for innovation. Before you start to plan a crowdsourcing job, do a little research to see whether an organisation offers a standardised service that can do the work that you need.

Getting a helping hand with bookkeeping

You can easily forget that crowdsourcing involves a substantial amount of bookkeeping. You can’t merely raise a crowd, ask it to do a job, and then disperse the members at the end of the day with the promise of milk and biscuits. You need to track each individual member of the crowd, know how much work that individual did and pay her, after completing all the appropriate paperwork and taxes.

As a crowdsourcer, you must keep the same kind of records that any other business keeps. Even though you're using a new form of management, you're still responsible for keeping records of your labour expenses. If the Internal Revenue Service or Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs asks you to explain the amounts that you paid for crowdsourced work, you need to be able to produce enough evidence to show that you actually paid the crowd for its work. If you don't know what records you need to keep, talk with a business school or an organisation such as the Better Business Bureau (www.bbb.org). (You can also find out more about the requirements of payrolls in Chapter 14.)

The bookkeeping services of the crowdsourcing platforms may actually be the greatest benefit of using them. These services enable you to focus on the work that you need to do. You don’t need to worry about the details of how to monitor the workers, keep records or file reports with tax agencies. You can concentrate on the details of the crowdsourcing job.

Cutting the risk factor

The first four benefits of crowdsourcing platforms add up to the final benefit of crowdsourcing platforms: they cut the risk of doing this kind of work.

Crowdsourcing isn’t an especially risky activity. Certainly, you shouldn’t feel that you’re likely to bankrupt yourself, destroy your reputation or foment revolution merely because you crowdsource. However, you do take a little risk when you crowdsource. You take the risk that you prepare a crowdsourcing job and no crowd comes to do it. You take the risk that the crowdworkers might not do the job properly. You take the risk that you might lose the money you budgeted for the crowdsourcing job, and more. You take the risk that you might gain a reputation as a bad crowdsourcer and never recover from it.

By working with a crowdsourcing platform, you reduce the risk of failing. You work in an environment that’s produced good crowdsourcing jobs in the past. You have a good crowd. You’re able to rely on the expertise of others. You follow best practices. And you don’t have to worry about many of the details of running a crowdsourcing job.

The more that you can reduce the risk of crowdsourcing, the more likely you are to be able to complete your crowdsourcing job and obtain a result you can use. Some crowdsourcing platforms are so confident in their own ability to do your job successfully that they offer a full refund if your job fails to produce a useful result. (You will, or course, want to check the conditions for this kind of refund.)

Finding the Right Crowd

When you’ve found a platform you like the look of, you need to review the crowd to see whether its members have the right skills and experience to be able to do your work.

Crowdsourcing attracts many kinds of workers. First, it attracts traditional workers who are trying to find a new market for their skill. Often, these workers are looking to earn some additional money, work non-standard hours, find new kinds of tasks or find more regular work by being part of a global market. Crowdsourcing also attracts workers who’ve gained their skills in non-traditional ways. They may not have formal training but they can do the work and find a market for their services with the crowd.

Crowdsourcing is concerned with accomplishment, not formal training. For all kinds of workers, those with traditional training and those who’ve learned on their own, their accomplishments are more important than their backgrounds. Accomplishments demonstrate what workers can actually do. Some platforms let you review the education and training of individual workers, but be sure to focus on accomplishments.

Reviewing products

Because crowdsourcing involves the work of the crowd, you usually find it best to start by reviewing accomplishments platform-wide rather than at the level of individual members. Most platforms display a gallery of recent projects that includes the original description of the project, the final work, and the cost of the project. In some cases, the platform also identifies the individual workers who contributed to the work.

Crowds are more important than individual workers. You may not be able to hire the workers who are promoted on the platform. However, if those workers are doing the kinds of work that you’re seeking, you know that you’re likely to find others like them in the crowd.

In reviewing products, pay careful attention to the prices of individual work projects. Crowds often divide, quite naturally, into two tiers:

Top tier: Experienced workers who’ve demonstrated their skills. They do consistently good work and get top payments for their labour.

Bottom tier: A much less consistent group of workers. Most have little experience and are trying to build a portfolio to show what they can do. Sometimes they do well. Sometimes they don’t. They’re generally paid less than the top-tier workers.

Make sure you price your job so that you get the kind of workers you want.

Checking out individual portfolios

In some kinds of crowdsourcing, notably macrotasking and certain crowdcontests, you can review the portfolios of individual workers. If you’re negotiating with a worker to do a task for you, this review is especially valuable, because you know the capabilities of the worker. However, you don’t always get to hire the worker you want, so look at portfolios as examples of the kinds of work that the crowd can do.

Most crowdsourcing platforms build the portfolios of clients and workers from their databases, hence the portfolios represent actual work by actual workers. However, you’d be naïve to assume that portfolio fraud never happens. If the work doesn’t seem consistent, contact the platform and ask for clarification, or look to other crowds.

In microtasking, you rarely have the opportunity to review the skills of any individual worker. At best, you may be able to see the portfolio of a worker that the platform has identified as outstanding. You make most of your judgements about the skills of the crowd by reviewing the products that the crowd has produced or by seeing how other organisations use the platform.

Looking for the Right Support

Crowdsourcing may be one of the trends that encourages do-it-yourself projects, but it’s still an activity that requires skill and discipline. You don’t sign up to a crowdsourcing platform and buy crowdsourcing labour in the way that you go into a convenience store and purchase a snack. To get the best results, you have to know what you’re doing, prepare your job, manage the work carefully, and review the results.

Many platforms provide an assistant to help with your project. For some platforms, these assistants are available to anyone who opens an account. On others, you have to pay an additional fee for this help. Generally, these assistants can help you with three activities:

Designing and managing your project

Mediating between you and the crowd over problems

Helping with intellectual property issues

Guiding your project

If you’re doing a crowdsourced project for the first time, you may receive a great deal of help from the assistants who work for the platform. Remember, each platform is a market with its own rules, procedures and quirks. You’re not merely creating a job. You’re placing that job on the market, managing it, and then trying to use the results in your own work or in your own organisation. The assistants can help you fit these tasks into the platform’s frameworks.

Listen to the advice of the assistants carefully and decide whether it’s sound. The assistants often try to fit you and your job into an existing mould. They try to make your work look like tasks they’ve handled before. This situation can be good or bad. If your work actually fits into the old pattern, the advice is great. You know that your work is similar to a job that’s been done successfully before. But if your job doesn’t match the models and ideas of prior jobs, you may face trouble. Your job may be forced into a shape that it doesn’t really fit. If this happens, you’re likely to have problems as you try to complete the job.

Acting as mediator

Most platforms have individuals who mediate between you and the crowd over any problems that emerge. Crowdsourcing places work in the context of a market; problems are generally claims and counterclaims about payments. The workers claim that they did the job properly and weren’t paid. As the crowdsourcer, you might claim that the work wasn’t done properly and hence you’re not prepared to pay the crowd. A mediator can help resolve the problem.

If a platform offers no mediator for problems between the crowdsourcer and the crowd, think carefully before using it. In such situations, you’re responsible for handling any disagreements that occur between you and the crowd.

In most cases, a disagreement between you and a crowdworker is likely to damage your reputation and produce a spate of bad publicity for you. Bad publicity can be quite damaging, and a crowdworker with a good social network can disrupt your ability to do many kinds of business. Furthermore, although in many crowdsourcing jobs the payments are too small to be accepted by most courts as a legitimate claim, some crowdsourcing jobs do involve substantial amounts of money and could be the basis for a court case. Indeed, some crowdworkers have filed court cases against companies when they thought they were underpaid.

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If you’re microtasking, you certainly want a platform with a mediator. If you get into trouble with a microtask crowd, you may find yourself handling hundreds or thousands of complaints. If the disagreement becomes serious enough, you may find yourself with a class action suit – a legal case that combines the interests of all the members of the crowd.

Protecting intellectual property

Make sure that the platform offers assistance with disputes over intellectual property. After disputes about payment, the second most common form of problem involves intellectual property. Often, these issues involve intellectual property that isn’t used, such as material that was submitted to a crowdcontest but didn’t win the prize, or the work of a macrotasker that was judged insufficient. In such cases, the crowdworkers may want to reuse such material in some form, but you might want to prevent such reuse because the material might identify your products or brands.

Good crowdsourcing platforms have detailed policies about intellectual property. However, you may need help understanding how such policies work and how they apply in cases of a disagreement. You may want help from a representative who can interpret the policies or serve as a mediator.

If you’re concerned about disputed intellectual property, ask the representative how the platform’s resolved disagreements in the past. The details of such cases may be confidential, but if not, such details can help you understand how to protect yourself.

If a crowdsourcing platform doesn’t have a policy regarding intellectual property, you can use this platform with the risk that you and the crowd will get into an argument about who owns the rights for the final work product.

Deciding How Much You Want to Do

You need to consider how deeply you want to be involved in the details of crowdsourcing. You may want to roll up your sleeves and get stuck in with the process and use it to radically transform your work or your organisation. On the other hand, you might just want a simple service and not care whether that service is provided by a crowd, a permanent employee or a pack of well-trained seals.

What kind of technical sophistication are you willing to bring to the project? You have a choice between two types of platform:

The simple, does-it-for-you platform: You need almost no technical skill for this type of platform. You give the platform the description of the job and the data. The platform returns the finished work.

Some crowdsourced platforms are little more than markets. They handle the details of each transaction with the worker but they do little to help you design your job and interact with your organisation. They require more effort on your part. At the same time, they’re generally less expensive than platforms that provide full organised services.

  The expect-you-to-be-a-techie platform: These platforms, which are often those involved with microtasking, offer application programming interfaces (APIs). APIs enable you to use the crowdsourcing platform as part of your own work or even as part of that of a bigger organisation. With an API, you can write programs that guide jobs in and out of the crowd, a process known as controlled workflow (see Chapter 16).

Crowdsourcers use controlled workflow when they do photographic tagging, for example, creating tiny tasks that ask different members of the crowd to do different things. The workflow passes a picture to one member of the crowd and asks her to identify the location of the photograph. The photograph then goes to another member of the crowd to determine whether the picture includes any people. Finally it passes to a third worker with a request for more information.

You can also use APIs to bring the crowd into traditional organisations. You can, for example, create for a company a piece of software that helps guide work through the organisation. It can pass the work from employee to employee and then call on the crowd for certain tasks.

Crowdsourcing APIs are an advanced topic. You need considerable expertise in Internet programming to use them well. (You can get more information about APIs in Chapter 16.)

As you review different crowdsourcing platforms, you find that they offer a trade-off between effort and cost. They more you have to do, the lower your cost. You need to decide how much effort you want to give to designing and managing your crowdsourcing project and how much money you’re willing to pay someone else to do that work for you.

If you’re new to crowdsourcing, you probably want the platform that gives you the greatest amount of support. You might want to make use of a standard service or the expertise of its staff. If you already have some crowdsourcing experience under your belt, don’t automatically assume that you need to move to a different platform. Many people keep working with the first platform they use, particularly if they’ve found a good and reliable crowd at that platform. Crowdsourcers tend to switch platforms when they seek a new crowd – a new group of people who’ll do a better job with their work – or if they want to develop a new kind of crowdsourcing service.

At some point, you might decide that you want to reorganise your crowdsourcing job. Perhaps instead of following the steps available on your current platform, you want the workers to handle the steps of your job in a different order or you want to engage them in a way that your current platform doesn’t allow. In such a case, you may be ready to move towards one of the platforms that encourages you to take charge of the job or even offers you an API so you can write a program to control the tasks.

Don’t think you have to be loyal to a single platform. Not all platforms do all things equally well. You may have different kinds of projects that work on different platforms. So, you may want to choose one platform for certain tasks and other platforms for others. But the more platforms you use, the more procedures and policies you have to know, so use as few platforms as possible to meet your needs.

Reading the Fine Print

Before you give your credit card number to a platform and start your crowdsourced job, you need to carefully review the policies for the platform. They form part of your agreement with the platform. Most platforms allow you to read their policies when you visit the platform. Some require you to open an account before you can see all the policies. However, all platforms allow you to read their policies before you submit the job.

Understanding the cost

As you review the platforms, you need to know the full cost of your job, which includes the cost of labour, the fees charged by the platform, and charges for additional services such as helping to set up the job or getting a more prominent placement for your job on the platform.

All crowdsourcing platforms charge for their services beyond the payments that you make to the crowd. You pay the cost of the job in one of two ways:

A surcharge: You pay an amount on top of the payments to the workers. Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, for example, adds an additional 10 per cent on top of labour costs.

A fixed fee: You pay a fee that covers both the costs of using the platform and the money that goes to the crowd. 99designs and many of the other crowdcontest sites often charge a fixed fee.

Most crowdsourcing platforms charge a comprehensive fee for their services. However, you need to verify that they don’t have other fees that aren’t obvious, such as fees for uploading data, for getting results to you in a certain format, or for publicising the endeavour.

Expecting a refund

Some platforms advertise that you receive a complete refund if you’re not satisfied with their services. You need to review the terms and conditions of such refunds. Crowdsourcing platforms are intermediaries and may only guarantee the quality of their own work, not that of the crowd. Review the policies to see whether the platform is indeed guaranteeing that it’ll provide a crowd that can do your work properly (a few do). To obtain a refund in such cases, you probably need to show that the failure of the crowd wasn’t caused by any mistake of yours. You’re likely to be responsible for communicating your needs to the crowd, for setting your price correctly, and for judging the work in a way that corresponds to your descriptions.

Knowing your responsibilities

When you give a job to a crowdsourcing platform, you’re a manager, not a consumer. You have the rights and responsibilities of someone who oversees some aspect of work. You should know how the platform expects you to describe your job and to state the criteria that you’ll use to judge the work and the means by which you will pay the workers.

Most crowdsourcing platforms have a lengthy set of policies. You should at least know the procedure that the platform uses to judge the work. You want to avoid the problem of having a task judged as being done correctly and hence requiring a payment even though you decide that the task doesn’t meet your requirements.

Doing a Little Comparison Shopping

The preceding sections give you pointers on choosing a platform. Now you can explore. Type 'crowdsourcing' into an Internet search engine together with a term that describes the task you want to do, and survey the results. Take a look at the Crowdsourcing.org website at http://crowdsourcing.org, too. This platform has the most current list of crowdsourcing platforms, organised as follows:

Cloud labour: Both macrotasking and microtasking

Crowd creativity: Crowdcontests for artists and similar activities

Crowdfunding: Both equity and non-equity crowdfunding

Distributed knowledge: Wikis, idea markets and other forms of collaboration; often a form of self-organised crowd

Open innovation: Crowdcontests and self-organised crowds for generating new ideas (see Chapters 9 and 18)

Also consider the crowdsourcing platforms I mention in the following sections and compare the different capabilities, policies and prices of each.

Often the easiest way to start crowdsourcing is to find someone who’s run a similar crowdsourcing job to the one you have in mind and copy what they’ve done. If you don’t know anyone among your friends or social network who’s crowdsourced before, you can turn to the crowdsourcing platforms. Most of them list projects that have been successfully run on their platforms. You can study these projects, see how they work and even contact the individuals who organised them.

Do be a little cautious when you read example projects on crowdsourcing websites. These websites like to post jobs that are successful rather than those that fail. Often, however, you learn more by reading about the failures than the successes. Just don’t expect many stories of failure on the commercial sites.

Good places to head to for stories of failure are the Crowdsourcing news sites, such as Daily Crowdsource (www.dailycrowdsource.com), crowdsourcing,org (www.crowdsourcing.org), Crowdsourcing Gazette UK (www.crowdsource-gazette.com) or crowdsourcingblog.de (www.crowdsourcingblog.de) in Germany. By making time to check on at some of these websites, you can get a better sense of problems that past crowdsourcers have encountered.

Checking out the contest providers

An early application of crowdcontests was graphic design. You can find dozens of platforms that offer design services for logos, business cards, brochures, web platforms and other products. Two such platforms are 99designs (www.99designs.co.uk) and crowdSPRING (www.crowdspring.com). The two platforms are similar but not identical. They offer similar design services that they organise into three levels. The different levels – inexpensive, moderately priced and expensive – engage different crowds and offer different services.

A related application of crowdcontests is the production of video commercials. Among the firms that offer crowdcontests for video production are Poptent (www.poptent.net) and GeniusRocket (www.geniusrocket.com). Both platforms allow you to run open contests that accept submissions from anyone and closed contests that are limited to individuals who've provided their skills. And the platforms offer portfolios of work that they've managed through their contests.

Connecting with the macrotaskers

Two of the larger and more active general macrotasking platforms are oDesk (www.odesk.com) and Elance (www.elance.com). Both platforms offer macrotasking for web development, software app development, accounting services, and a variety of technical, business and other tasks. They have similar crowds and similar pricing policies. However, oDesk has more sophisticated technology for tracking work and hence has different procedures and different policies for managing macrotasking.

You can find many specialised macrotasking platforms, including two that deal exclusively with software development: uTest (www.utest.com) and TopCoder (www.topcoder.com). The two platforms deal with slightly different kinds of services and hence have different crowds, different interfaces, different policies and different pricing schemes. uTest provides a software testing service, and TopCoder offers a wide range of software development services.

Looking at options for microtasking

Microtasking platforms tend to be divided according to the services they provide. If you’re looking to do photographic tagging, you go to one of four or five different platforms. If you’re going to be carrying out a transcription, you look at a second group of platforms. If you’re translating a text from one language into another, you go to a third group of platforms.

The only exception among microtasking platforms is Amazon's Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), which is a general-purpose microtasking marketplace. Mechanical Turk has developed a large crowd of general-skill workers that can handle well-established tasks such as transcription or data cleaning, or it can be used as a place to develop new microtasks.

You may find that you need a certain sophistication to use Mechanical Turk. You can, however, use Mechanical Turk through other microtasking platforms that serve as simplified interfaces for certain kinds of jobs. For example, Smartsheet (www.smartsheet.com) connects Mechanical Turk to the cells of a spreadsheet.

Many microtasking platforms use Mechanical Turk as a general crowdmarket. They give you access to the large crowd supported by Mechanical Turk and yet make it easier to prepare jobs for that crowd. They also manage the crowd, so that you don’t have to deal with any disagreements between yourself and the crowd.

Among the list of microtasking platforms that utilise Mechanical Turk are the following:

Microtask (www.microtask.com): Offers transcription services. It takes handwritten documents and puts them into machine-readable form. It's developed a sophisticated process that uses Mechanical Turk as its source of labour. This process ensures that the work is done accurately and that the information remains confidential.

CrowdFlower (http://crowdflower.com): Offers a much larger collection of services including data cleaning, tagging, sentiment analysis, data collection and surveys. Each of these services has its own process and manager. CrowdFlower not only uses Mechanical Turk as a microtask labour source but also engages other labour markets.

Tagasauris (www.tagasauris.com): Provides secure tagging services. You provide it with pictures or other forms of data, and it gets the crowd to provide descriptions and keywords for that input. Like the other platforms, it's developed a process that utilises Mechanical Turk as a labour source. However, Tagasauris is built on a sophisticated technology that you can reconfigure to handle different kinds of microtask service.

For more on Mechanical Turk, visit Chapter 3.

Finding the best funders

Crowdfunding platforms tend to be more localised than the other forms of crowdsourcing. When you crowdfund, you need to tap into a crowd that knows your needs, understands your goals, and believes in what you're doing. Furthermore, crowdfunding is governed by local laws, whether it involves doing charity work, non-equity funding or equity crowdfunding. Still, several large regional platforms exist. Among them are two based in the USA: Kickstarter (www.kickstarter.com) and WhenYouWish (www.whenyouwish.com).

The two platforms have much in common but differ on a key policy. Kickstarter supports all-or-nothing crowdfunding. You have to raise pledges for the entire sum or you get nothing. By contrast, WhenYouWish attempts to collect all the pledges for your project even if you haven’t reached the goal that you set.

Because crowdfunding is often controlled by local laws, you may have to search for platforms that are based near you or your organisation. In Europe, you can find booomerang.dk (www.booomerang.dk) in Denmark and Crowdcube (www.crowdcube.com) in the UK.