[OLAC-credits] FW: Crowdsourcing and gamification, etc.

[Kelley McGrath]

Posting for Karen... 

If anyone else is getting rejected by the list, **please** let me know. I am a novice at managing this kind of list and I seem to have gotten some setting mangled--Kelley
________________________________________
From: Karen Benko [Karen.Gorss.Benko at williams.edu]
Sent: Thursday, January 16, 2014 5:36 AM
To: olac-credits at lists.uoregon.edu
Subject: Crowdsourcing and gamification, etc.

I agree completely. Every time I go to the annotator, I wonder, How many
have I done? How many have been done total? How many are in the project
as a whole, still waiting to be done? Are we close to finishing? Also,
how many have I done compared to other people? Have my translations been
the same as others' translations of the same terms? Who else is working
on these right now? Is anyone else I know working on them? Anyone else
in my area?

Wow, that is a lot of questions. Probably not all useable, but I was
brainstorming.

I doubt that I would put it out anywhere (resume, facebook, etc.), but I
would get a kick out of knowing, myself.


-------- Original Message --------



Date: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 04:56:27 +0000
From: Kelley McGrath <kelleym at uoregon.edu>


Thanks, Julie. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
________________________________
From: olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu
[olac-credits-bounces at lists.uoregon.edu] on behalf of Julie Moore
[julie.renee.moore at gmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, January 12, 2014 12:11 PM
To: olac-credits at lists.uoregon.edu
Subject: Re: [OLAC-credits] Crowdsourcing and gamification, etc.

I think that if you could find a way to provide an incentive of some
sort to those who participate, it would be helpful. I think it would be
helpful for people to challenge themselves, if they could see that if
they make so many submissions, you get a gold star that you can put on
Facebook or whatever. People spend crazy amounts of hours playing
Farmville and Candy Crush and Angry Birds ... and I think part of it is
keeping an eye on the points or stars ... even if they are just virtual
and have no monetary value. This is volunteer work, and just like with
people who are donors, you often see levels -- a silver donor, a
platinum donor, a gold donor, depending on the donations. Volunteers for
libraries and museums also often receive certain kudos to strive toward
for their voluntary efforts.

It's something that ultimately, the  person could maybe even put on
their resume or facebook or LinkedIn account that could have meaning.
Such a reward system keeps it on your radar ... when we are all so crazy
busy with our day jobs and regular lives. Perhaps if there were a
certain level of "cataloging star" (with stars of all colors) to be had,
people might opt to do that instead of playing Candy Crush! :-)

Just a thought!

Julie Moore
Fresno State


On Sun, Jan 12, 2014 at 11:43 AM, Kelley McGrath
<kelleym at uoregon.edu<mailto:kelleym at uoregon.edu>> wrote:
The main reason I have been holding off on more publicity is that I'm
wondering if we need to do something different with the site to
encourage people to keep coming back. I have not done a lot of research
into crowdsourcing, but apparently a lot of the successful projects use
gamification to make their tasks  more interesting. Wikipedia defines
gamification as "the use of game thinking and game mechanics in non-game
contexts to engage users in solving problems"
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification). Gamification might be too
much to take on right now, especially with limited resources for
development, but it is something that I'm interested in for the future.

Someone who is more familiar with these projects than I am suggested
that even adding a simple counter (sort of like those fund-raising goal
thermometers) would be a good motivator. I asked the developer to do
something like this and he said it wouldn't be hard. Unfortunately, he
just switched day jobs and doesn't have a lot of extra time so it hasn't
materialized yet.

Another thing that might be helpful is allowing people to track their
own contributions. The developer had initially suggested that it would
be easy to set the site up so people could log in through FB, Google,
etc. or even as a stand-alone. He was concerned about the potential for
spam submissions (which have not materialized). By the time we got the
form itself working reasonably well, I think we were both so tired of it
that we were just ready to put it out there. I don't want to require a
logon, but we could possibly develop it as an option. If we had user
accounts, you could see how many credits you've done and I imagine it
could be set up to send the kind of reminder emails that Karen would
find helpful.

I am interested in this question of recruiting and retaining volunteers
not just for the current project, but also because we will need people
to contribute to future parts of the project on an ongoing basis,
especially with interpreting the data that the computer can't handle.

Thoughts? Ideas?

Kelley