Building crowdsourcing applications

Crowdsourcing applications take indigestible tasks and break them down into digestible pieces, enabling a group to help plough through large scale projects in much shorter periods of time.

Designing and building crowdsourcing applications incorporates a fascinating range of challenges, from usability, psychology and interaction design to scaling applications for surges of traffic – all the while ensuring that contributors are rewarded, good behaviour is encouraged and the resulting data comes out in a useful format.

This talk will discuss lessons learned building serious crowdsourcing applications on newsroom schedules at the Guardian, and playful crowdsourcing features for WildlifeNearYou.com.