Closer To The Ideal

Erowid.org is a site where people write about their experiences using drugs. However, every post is moderated and edited. This leads to a very serious backlog, with the editorial staff falling far behind, in terms of editing:

Unfortunately, the level of care our review crew strives for makes it difficult for us to keep up with the number of incoming reports–currently a steady 25 per day–so we are constantly falling behind. Early in 2002, Sophie lead a charge to clear out pending reports more than a year old, and succeeded. But even weeks of nothing but experience reviewing only caught us up to last year’s submissions. There are thousands of reports which have never been read. When people inquire why their report hasn’t been posted to the site, we sheepishly have to respond that we are doing the best we can to work through the submitted reports, but that the project is critically understaffed and underfunded.

The solution to the problem may seem to be simple: finding more people to do the reviewing work. But people who volunteer to review reports often imagine the process to be much more fun than it is. Unfortunately this leads to most volunteers quitting before they begin. Even with a rigorous application process to weed out those who aren’t serious, along with a request that people commit to reviewing at least 40 reports before giving up, less than half who agree actually complete 40 reports. Since it takes more than an hour to train someone in on the interface and then another few hours of oversight by a second-tier reviewer, finding committed reviewers can be a burden on the busiest of the crew.

A cautionary tale about relying on volunteer help. It works for Wikipedia, but I suspect it won’t work for most sites.

Just had another call from a head hunter. They’ve lined up a gig they say will last “3 to 6 months”. For some reason this makes me recall being in college in the late 1980s, and some of the professors trying to give us students some career advice:

Whatever you do, never a quit a job unless you’ve been there at least 2 years. 5 years is better but 2 is the minimum. Even if you hate your boss, try to stick it out. If you quit before 2 years, then you’ll get a reputation as a job hopper. No one will ever hire you again. No one wants to hire a job hopper.

Hilarious, compared to nowadays. Things have changed 180 degrees.

For the most part I like the change, though I realize some important things have been lost. Back in the 40s and 50s and 60s (the New Deal era) the ideal was big, safe corporations that gave you life time employment. America had a secure middle class. People worked less, and people in the poorest 40% were better paid then than they are now. But, god, how boring to stay with one corporation for your whole life. That’s the stifling conformism that Kerouac and Ginsberg were rebelling against. It is tragic that we have lost the security offered by those years, but I can not regret the loss of the enforced homogeneity of life goals. The end of the office, and the future of work sums up the changes:

The middle of the 20th century was the age of the great employer: Mainstream success was a stable job at a single company, steadily ascending from middle to upper management. That began to change in the 1970s and 1980s, for reasons that were social as well as economic: American conglomerates began to face stiff foreign competition, and the country accustomed itself to – and even began to celebrate – a more mercurial, less cosseted brand of capitalism. The Organization Man was replaced by the worker as free agent, one who might with little regret leave a job when a competitor gave a better offer, or who might be left jobless when his company merged with another. The arc of the average career trajectory grew more fractured.

What we’re seeing today, says Thomas Malone, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the author of the 2004 book “The Future of Work,” is a further shift. The growing freelance workforce, he argues, is made up of people who see themselves not as having a single job so much as having several at once. To describe the current change, Malone borrows an image that the sociologist Alvin Toffler used to describe the earlier one.

“One of the things [Toffler] said was that we should move from the idea of a career as a linear progression up the ranks in a single organization to that of a career as a portfolio of jobs that you hold over time in a series of different organizations,” says Malone. “What I’m just now realizing is that many people today see their career portfolio including a combination of jobs at the same time.”

Malone believes that new forms of freelancing will help drive this change. Companies like iStockphoto (a stock photograph and image site containing the work of over 70,000 artists), Threadless (a T-shirt design company where anyone can submit designs and evaluate others), and Elance (an online source of skilled freelance labor) are models of companies where not just secondary jobs but the core function of the business is outsourced to a diffuse online workforce. All are helping connect client companies and freelance laborers to each other easily, without a traditional intermediary and with stricter standards than online marketplaces like Craigslist.

These sites allow freelancers to field and respond to far more offers than they would previously have been able to, and to create a far larger and more diverse slate of jobs at any one time. Successful Elance workers often have nine or ten projects going at any one time.

I grew up close to this future. My dad was a freelance stock photographer from 1950 to 2007. He made a fantastic living at it, at least till the Internet hit the industry in the late 90s. For all of my childhood, he loved his work and enjoyed a very flexible lifestyle. From a very young age, I knew I wanted to grow up and enjoy a lifestyle similar to his.

To some extent, the change strikes me as a continuation of the movement from status to contract. When everyone is their own freelance agent, then the last vestige of status will fade from this world.

Jarred Myers dreams up a micro consulting scenario:

Let me indulge you with a role play, factory owner Jimmy is debating replacing his aging machinery, he has 4 options, rent, buy, finance or push it till it breaks, what does he do? This may look like an exam question, which it indeed could be, but it’s a real problem that a competent management accountant has the tools to address.

Jimmy posts his dilemma with a list of documentation available for decision making, he states the price range he’s prepared to pay for the service and awaits proposals.

Young smart underemployed management accountant Andrew, looks at this post and says “hey, I can do that, and I could use the cash” Andrew submits his proposal, Jimmy likes his approach, they agree on payment terms and deliverables and a management tool is born.

Jimmy benefits by not needing to employ a full time management accountant but still has the expertise available and Andrew spent a few nights after work earning some extra cash for his weekend getaway.

…so is this a potential new management tool? Could businesses outsource operational decisions? There’s a long list of advantages and disadvantages to a model like this but I believe the niche exists, at the risk of bastardizing another prefix; we could be looking at a new field called micro-consulting or for those who prefer processing information graphically, the long tail of management accounting.

This is the direction I’d like to go with what we started over at WP Questions. If that site does well, I’d like to do other, similar sites, expanding into every niche where small scale, remote consulting can work. However, Myers seems to think this is a species of crowd sourcing. I do not. Either a site focuses on the power of crowds, or it focuses on the power of experts. I do not think it can do both. I realize the difference is subtle, and in some cases there is no practical difference, but over the long term, I imagine these will be seen as distinct categories. The thing about consulting and experts is the degree of trust. Our very understanding of expertise is bound up with a sense of trust. Experts have reputations. Experts are mini-celebrities. A site trying to facilitate the skills, and the wisdom, of experts needs to proceed along different lines than a crowd sourcing site.

At some point I’d like to work on one of the dating sites. They seem to often make huge money. Lots of people meet their mates online nowadays. It is clearly one of the main things that people use the Internet for. And some really interesting sociology data comes out of it.

The interesting thing on the OK Cupid site was that the non-normalized responses from men looked as if they’d been normalized into a bell curve – the men thought most women were of average looks, a few women were rated good looking, and a few were rated ugly. Meanwhile the women rated 80% of the men as below average in attractiveness.

Also, GirlsAskGuys is an interesting example of crowd-sourcing brought to the dating world – got a question about the other gender? Ask the crowd.

A very interesting conversation about the failures of crowd-sourcing (they are discussing the way images from the Library Of Congress (LOC) were tagged by users of Flickr):

This blog post caught my eye (hattip to george!):
“Lick This”: LOC, Flickr, and the Limits of Crowd Sourcing

The author argues that finding good content in the user-generated comments, tags, and notes is like finding a needle in a haystack. Using an LOC photo, the author explains,

There are 20-30 notes on the photograph and not one contains useful historical information to give context or help us understand the photograph. Most are throw-away jokes or comments, “I love this fabric!” and “Lick this” (referring to the woman’s forehead!). Most of the rest of the notes refer to the woman’s appearance or the composition of the picture. Almost useful is a little nested debate about the authenticity of the photograph–how staged was it?–but the discussion is hard to floow, involving hovering the mouse over each box to see the comment.

The author, Larry Cebula. a Public Historian at Eastern Washington University and Assistant Digital Archivist at the Washington State Digital Archives, argues,

The notes are mostly smart-ass remarks, the comments are empty, the tags are idiosyncratic. The frustrating thing is that there really is some crowdsourced gold withing the flood of junk, such as the transcriptions of hand-lettered signs in the windows of the Brockton Enterprise newspaper office in this photo.

There follows a good discussion in the comments, so go check it out if this subject interests you.

I looked on the comments on some of the images, and I agree that there is a lot of waste. Some photos have 20 or more people who simply posted (on the photo itself) “Cool pix!”

For my part, I am a big believer in the potential of crowd sourcing, but I don’t see many sites capturing that potential. I think crowd sourcing works best when the crowd can be offered some kind of incentive, perhaps with a raffle, or a prize, or something free, or an outright offer of money. Some kind of incentive would, I think, raise the average quality of the responses.

Morgan Zuehlke suggests that a customer-to-customer question and answer site is a great way to handle customer support for certain companies, such as Apple:

Apple is unique. Their lifestyle-permeating products cultivate customers who enjoy providing answers to others with no evident reward beyond the satisfaction of shared knowledge. Not many companies are blessed with such dedicated customers. Taking the Apple.com customer-to-customer model a few steps further in the Yahoo! Answers direction, a Q/A system can involve call and response credits. This inspires users to answer each other’s questions in order to earn the ability to ask a question. This is precisely how Yahoo! Answers built up such an active body of users sharing an incredible wealth of knowledge (and lack, thereof)!

Dunder Mifflin is not the best fit. Much like creating a social network, this is not suited for every company. Here are some key questions to ask when evaluating whether or not the Yahoo! Answers model would be a good fit for your company:

1. Do my customers consider my product or service to be a part of their lifestyle?

2. Do we get a high volume of customer service inquiries?

3. If we have a message board on our company site, is it very active?

4. Do my customers have more than just one or two questions about interacting with my products throughout the course of our relationship?

5. Do my customers have things in common with each other?

If you can answer “Yes” to all of these questions, your company would likely be a good fit for a Q/A system modeled after Yahoo! Answers.

But he points out that the model fails unless the customers are passionate about the product, and unless they, for some reason, want to volunteer their time to helping other customers.

For other companies another approach is needed – offering small cash rewards to have customers help other customers. This would be similar to the community that grew up on the tech-support boards on AOL back in 1993 and 1994. Back then, AOL charged $2.95 per hour you were online, but the fee was waived if you volunteered time on the tech support boards.

What most companies need is software that allows for questions and answers, and which makes it easy to distribute small amounts of cash back to users who contribute a lot.

Jeff Howe writes about crowd sourcing and how some sites are getting designers to work on spec:

So one might expect crowdSPRING and 99designs to wither away like so many other seemingly ill-conceived Web 2.0 start ups. Instead, they seem to be flourishing. 99designs says it has paid out over $4 million to its community of 30,000 artists, and crowdSPRING expects to be profitable by next year. The success of crowdsourced design has sparked a vibrant, highly emotional debate within the design industry.

Alarmed by the popularity of the spec model, a group of designers formed a protest group called NO!SPEC to persuade their colleagues (and prospective clients) to just say no to design contests.

He make the point that what is now happening to design is what earlier happened to stock photography:

iStockphoto and other so-called “microstock” agencies capitalized on a similar disparity. The result was the total disruption of the $2 billion stock photo industry. iStock is now the third-largest purveyor of stock images, and some 96 percent of its “workforce” is comprised of amateurs. In my crowdsourcing book I posed the question of whether stock photography was an isolated case, or just the canary in the coal mine. It was an open question as of April 2008 when I submitted the final changes to my galleys. Now it ain’t. The canary is prone, lying motionless on a bed of its own droppings. It looks like it’s time to find another mine.

My dad was a stock photographer during the golden years, 1950-1990, when it was possible to make really good money doing stock photography – adjusting for inflation, 6 figure annual incomes. That began to change in the 90s, due the proliferation of royalty-free images, and distribution over the Internet (some of the same forces that re-shaped the music business). And then, there was the incredible consolidation of the business. An industry that had been made up of hundreds of small and mid-sized businesses consolidated around just 2 giants: Corbis and Getty.

Getty, in particular, acquired a reputation for offering harsh contracts to photographers. My dad was irritated that they offered “on spec” contracts, where sometimes the photographer was asked to shoot a subject, but had no guarantee of pay, or inclusion in the collection. My dad never signed such a contract, but rather, continued to work with some of the smaller stock agencies that remained independent. But these firms all suffered declining revenues.

The new micro-stock royalty free web sites are again transforming the business.

By the way, this is off-topic, but I find it amusing. Be careful what you photograph:

Thibaud Elziere, the CEO of micropayment site Fotolia, was detained by police for eight hours after he took a photo of a security camera at the French Prime Minister’s residence.

According to a posting on the Fotolia company blog, Elziere was testing a new camera while on a walk in Paris on Sept. 21. Police officers stopped him when they saw him snap a picture of a security camera.

According to the blog, Elziere didn’t realize he was photographing something sensitive. He explained to the police who he was and what he was doing, and deleted the picture from his camera as an act of good faith. Police checked his background before releasing him eight hours later.