I’ve got several session ideas rattling around my head. I doubt I could talk about any of them for more than 20 minutes, but if one of them fits well with another THATCamper’s interests, perhaps we can put a session together.
The last year or so has seen a lot of buzz about Citizen Scientists, Citizen Archivists, and many yet-unlabeled communities of people who volunteer their Serious Leisure time collaborating with institutions and each other to produce and enhance scholarship. Institutions are becoming interested in engaging that public via their own on-line presences and harnessing public enthusiasm to perform costly tasks, spread the word about the institution, and enhance their understanding of their own collections. Less well understood is the difficulty of finding those passionate volunteers and the nuances of keeping volunteers motivated.
I’ve been blogging about crowd-sourcing within my own niche (manuscript transcription) for a few years, and one of the subjects I’ve tracked is the varying assumptions about volunteer motivation built into different tools. Some applications (Digitalkoot) rely entirely on game-like features as incentives, while others (uScript, VeleHanden) enforce a rigid accounting scheme. There is a real trade-off between these extrinsic motivations and the intrinsic forces that keep volunteers participating in projects like Wikisource or Van Papier Naar Digitaal, and project managers run the risk of de-motivating their volunteers. Very few projects (OldWeather and USGS’s Bird Phenology Program among them) have balanced these well, but those have seen amazing results.
As a software developer my focus has been on the features of a web application, but finding volunteer communities to use the applications is equally important. I’ve got a few ideas about what makes a successful on-line volunteer project but I’d love to hear from people from different backgrounds who have more experience in both on-line and real-world outreach.
#1 by Ben Brumfield on April 12, 2011 - 7:04 pm
I’ve just posted a session idea devoted to crowdsourcing. I’m still very interested in presenting my original proposal on the mechanics of motivating volunteers, but am not sure if it or Amy’s session idea should be wedged into the crowdsourcing session or stand alone.
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#2 by Rebecca Davis on April 12, 2011 - 4:51 pm
I would love a session on crowdsourcing, especially one that gets into the practical challenges.
#3 by Ben Brumfield on March 29, 2011 - 1:53 am
LibraryThing is just amazing. One of the things that wows me most as an application developer is that they’ve made one of the most odious, repetitive database tasks (de-duplication of records) and turned it into a feature so easy to use and so transparent that there are actual clubs of volunteers formed to combine authors and works.
#4 by Laurel Stvan on March 29, 2011 - 1:22 am
LibraryThing is the app where I’ve seen this happen the most fruitfully. They have a pretty vast crowd of people tagging, disambiguating authors, and grouping things into sequels. They’re all volunteer. I heard some good talks earlier this year on Mechanical Turk as source of linguistic judgments, and the consequences re IRB and income taxes. It’s got me thinking a lot about crowd sourcing. I’d be interested to hear more.
#5 by Ben Brumfield on March 27, 2011 - 9:08 pm
Crowdsourcing is a big, big issue — why don’t you post a session idea with some of the specific things that are on your mind and we’ll see what we can put together?
#6 by Andrew J. Torget on March 27, 2011 - 8:00 pm
Personally, I’d love to do a session with you all on “crowd-sourcing your sources” and all the permutations of that issue. We’re contemplating a crowd-sourcing aspect of a big project we’re doing on a large personal papers collection, and I’d love to talk about these issues in more depth.
#7 by tara.carlisle on March 25, 2011 - 10:04 pm
Great session idea! I certainly would be interested in participating. I coordinate digitization projects for the Portal to Texas History and work with institutions who rely heavily on community involvement. Some volunteer programs remind me of quilting bees – volunteers show up for “metadata day” and contribute their collective memories to provide meaning to many unidentified photos or documents. Other institutions use Facebook to build and promote collections.
#8 by Ben Brumfield on March 25, 2011 - 12:20 am
I think they might do very nicely together as well. It’s early yet, so let’s see how all the other session ideas fit together.
#9 by amyschexnayder on March 22, 2011 - 10:11 pm
I think your session idea and mine would go well together! I would love to hear more about this.