Digitalkoot: crowdsourcing Finnish Cultural Heritage

Many years ago, before the Industrial Revolution, specialization and Justin Bieber changed human existence forever, jobs requiring many hands brought communities together.

In Finland, building a house was once such a job. The collective effort was called a talkoot (in English the closest translation we have is “working-bee” or “barn-raising”).

Even if you are not Amish, I’m sure you have experienced something like it when moving to a new apartment. Your friends come over, you tell them about your serious back pain, they lift your washing machine and grand piano down the winding stairs. At the end of the day, when your back doesn’t seem to hurt too much anymore, you offer them cold pizza and the solemn vow to be there for them when they next move.

2011: the year Finnish culture went electric
With all this in mind, we are proud to introduce Digitalkoot: the first public Microtask-powered service. We are running it in collaboration with the National Library of Finland.

The library is currently scanning and indexing its enormous archives, in order to make them searchable over the Internet and easily accessible for everyone. So far so good. The problem is that the optical character recognition software (OCR) used to input the text occasionally makes mistakes. These mistakes significantly affect the ability to search and use the archives, so must be corrected. This might seem simple enough, until you consider that the mistakes must be corrected by humans, and the National Library has four million pages of archives.

This is where Microtask comes in. Instead of spending millions of euros and many years trying to correct these mistakes using library employees, the idea is to use a voluntary crowdsourced workforce. Now the great part: rather than asking the crowd to spend time tediously reading through text that may not interest them, all they need to do is play social computer games.

For those of you have been paying attention to our blog over the last few months, you will recall us talking about using gaming mechanisms to make repetitive tasks more fun (click here or here for the posts). Today we are proud to say that the talking is over (well, not over, but we have some action for you). Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, today we bring you Mole Bridge and Mole Hunt, two brand new games with the vintage flavor of gaming classics such as Lemmings and Whac-A-Mole.

Your country needs YOU
Behind the games is a simple recognition mechanism: the player is shown the original image of a word that the OCR software has had a problem with. The volunteer then has a few seconds to either type the word in or check its accuracy. Starting with system-wide score leaderboards (making Facebook challenges available soonish), Digitalkoot’s goal is to get players and their networks hooked to the cause of culture digitalization.

Harri Holopainen, Microtask’s Managing Director, is excited about the scope and implications of the project:

“The Internet will change the way people work. Instead of going to work, work will come to you. We decided to start with something simple, yet meaningful: type a few words to digitize your culture for later generations.”

With its enormous archives, the National Library of Finland can promise volunteers millions of good excuses to play computer games while at work. Could anyone seriously complain when what you are really doing is saving a country’s cultural heritage?

We will start with 19th century copies of the newspaper Aamulehti (The Morning Paper) and proceed towards the complete digitalization of the Finnish cultural heritage.

Start saving moles (and Finnish culture) here!

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Net cops: cybercrime and the crowd

No doubt about it, Hollywood loves a hacker. On the big screen, your average cyber-nut is a cool (suspiciously good-looking) loner with the kind of IQ Albert Einstein would envy.

“Good” hackers – Neo from the Matrix or Acid Burn (aka a very fresh faced Angelina Jolie) – might play around a little with the law, but ultimately they put their genius toward battling crime bosses, evil corporations or psychotic sunglasses-wearing A.I.

But, as with spies, the Mafia and teenage wizards, when it comes to hackers the movie business has employed a generous dose of creative license. Shockingly, it turns out that what the authorities could really do with in the fight against cybercrime is not a Kung-Fu fighting Keanu, but help from the crowd.

Continental Intelligence
Head of Europol (Europe’s answer to the CIA) Rob Wainwright recently announced his plan to get the masses directly involved in stopping online bad guys.

Basically, the problem is that after twenty years of the web there’s still no concrete data on the scope and extent of cybercrime. We’re not just talking criminal mastermind level stuff here, but also everyday offenses: email scams, security attacks, credit card fraud – the bread and butter of the online underworld. Why is info on these infractions so scarce? First, because they’re low level – even the most dedicated citizens don’t always bother to report them. Secondly, data that does exist ends up spread across hundreds of police forces, credit card companies and consumer groups.

Wainwright wants to change all that. He envisages a Europe-wide system that allows the crowd to feed details of any internet misdemeanor, however trivial, into an international database. There’s a similar project already up and running in the US – the Internet Crime Complaint center.

At first glance merely working out the scope of cybercrime may not seem like a great step towards solving it. But then again (apologies to any English teachers for the mixed metaphors) if you don’t know your enemies, you’re likely to end up chasing ghosts in the machine.

A hacker’s paradise?
It isn’t everyday the EU gets the chance to build a brand new cybercrime center. It’ll be interesting to see how creative Europol is prepared to be in implementing Rob Wainwright’s grand plan. The intelligence chief has timidly talked about (wait for it guys) “a website”. Trouble is, to get a complete picture of online crime you have to make reporting it a reflex – something web users do automatically. For that, surely Europol needs to get right into the scene of the action. I’m thinking a big red “report crime” button in browsers, email and shopping sites, that pops up a Europol form when clicked (along with appropriate sound effects).

The effect crowd action has on net crime really depends on how “intelligently” intelligence agencies handle the information. It’s one thing to collect millions of online violations but what will happen to all that data? How do you make sure serious crimes – big-scale fraud, money laundering, sex offenses – don’t end up buried in the mountain of lesser offences? Plus it’s a big globalized world out there, even trans-European Europol has little or no power over Nigerian fraudsters or Russian hackers.

There comes a point in life of every geek when you just have to accept you’re probably never going to foil an international conspiracy from your laptop. The odd email scam, on the other hand, is the sort of crime almost any net user can help bring down – just a shame it doesn’t have quite the same blockbuster appeal…

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Bribes and Prejudice: India’s crowdsourcing revolution

If there’s one thing that unites people the world over, it’s complaining about politicians. Whether you’re black or white, old or young, right or left there’s nothing quite as human as having a good moan about the people in charge.

At Microtask we pride ourselves on upholding this ignoble tradition with our “constructive criticism” of state-run crowdsourcing efforts (see here and here, oh and here).

In the West, government corruption – whether it’s the influence of lobbying groups or the latest WikiLeaks scandal – is certainly a hot topic. But spare a thought for the billion or so citizens of India. On the subcontinent, corruption isn’t confined to news reports but exists at every level of society: a real and unwelcome intrusion into daily life.

Backhanders in Bangalore
In India, like everywhere else, high-level corruption is what makes the headlines. In 2010 there were money-laundering ministers, a cricket boss wanted for tax fraud and top journalists in the pay of industrial tycoons. But while they make good copy (just try typing “corruption India” into Google News), these guys are only the tip of the (very grubby) iceberg. Underneath is the more mundane, everyday extortion that can happen to anyone: paying bribes to get your electricity hooked up, at police checkpoints, to get your kids into college. It’s corruption at this level that has the crowd fighting back – crowdsourcing style.

Taking the saying that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” to heart, Bangalore based site ipaidabribe invites Indians to share their grievances online. Thousands of people have responded, detailing the place, time and amounts involved. The identity of the officials taking bribes isn’t revealed so the site isn’t so much “name and shame”, as an attempt to scope out the scale of the problem. Ipaidabribe lets citizens report corruption in three languages and authors hope to eventually take the concept worldwide.

Work in progress
Anti-corruption sites are just one example of crowdsourcing innovation in a country at full throttle when it comes to getting ahead online. Along with crowdsourcing as a means of protest, there’s also been a huge increase in the number of distributed workers. On Mechanical Turk alone estimates are that around 35% of Turkers are now based in India (Amazon has even introduced payment in rupees). The crowdsourcing workforce is predominately under 30 and educated to degree level. Put another way, thousands of young, intelligent citizens are opting into a marketplace where corruption – at least in the traditional sense – simply doesn’t exist. While crowdsourcing work has its faults (spam, bad payers, lack of persistent reputations) it certainly isn’t a job where you need an uncle in the business to get started. And, from simple HITs on Mechanical Turk to projects worth hundreds of dollars on Freelancer, there’s an ever-growing variety of web-based opportunity.

Of course, being bribe-free on the net doesn’t necessarily change anything in the real world. But I suspect that the motivated, independent and experienced Indian crowd will be unlikely to let offline corruption go on unchallenged.

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E-petitions: a vote for the future?

Generally in life, I’m as upbeat and optimistic as the next guy (as long as the next guy’s another world-weary net geek). But when it comes to government crowdsourcing initiatives, I gotta admit, my cynicism radar starts to twitch. Like an out of control chemistry class, state funded crowdsourcing projects tend to start with a bang and end with a whimper.

Take the UK elections last year. Back in May we covered the embarrassing crush politicians had with online social media. As well as constantly tweeting and setting up Facebook groups, the UK Conservative Party began a scheme to get crowd input on ways to cut government spending. A few months and a few thousand of responses later, what happened? Well, pretty much nothing. You have to give the UK Government credit for trying, but why call on the crowd at all if you don’t listen when they answer?

Digital Debates
Given their track record, I couldn’t help feeling a little skeptical when I read the latest pledge by the same Conservative party: any e-petition with over 100,000 votes on the UK government website will be guaranteed a debate in Parliament. But since it’s a new year, I’m prepared to give the guys in suits another chance and take the idea seriously. It’s actually a pretty exciting concept: 100,000 clicks and the issues people care about most will get aired in one of the world’s oldest (though not necessarily most mature or well behaved) parliaments.

E-petitions aren’t a new phenomena for UK citizens. In fact, they’ve long been part of the official Number 10 Downing Street website (note it’s currently suspended. I can feel my New Year goodwill fading fast…). In 2007 one influential campaign against new road pricing laws got over a million signatures causing a pretty swift (and not exactly dignified) u-turn in government policy. Voice of the people: heard.

The crowbar of democracy?
As anyone who’s ever wielded a charity clipboard knows, petitions suit single-issue, negative campaigning. Critics of the Conservatives’ plan worry that an avalanche of negative petitioning will clog up the work of government. Even Peter Roberts, the man behind the road pricing campaign, has called e-petitions “a blunt instrument”. What if every tax rise and cutback got blocked by citizens? (Refer to the state of California’s finances for answer.) Or if internet-savvy lobbying groups – such as the green movement or the food industry – hijacked the site, pushing their own agendas?

But before we all sink back into the warm embrace of political apathy, let’s remember one obvious but often overlooked fact: an e-petition isn’t the same as a paper petition. A paper petition stops with a signature. I’m not knocking that: it’s simple, powerful, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin politics. But, if governments got their acts together, e-petitions have the potential to be much more. With a well set up, well-moderated site you could create constructive petitions, giving people the chance to suggest alternatives to government policy. Of course, that would mean a whole pile of new data – but why not also use crowd labor to sort it, categorize it, and filter out spam? If that’s too high-tech for the UK government to grasp, even the most basic e-petition site could easily allow citizens to down-vote – registering opinion against, as well as for, petitions.

There’s no technical reason for e-petitions to fail and, as previous campaigns show, citizens are clearly eager for online democracy. It’s basically all down to the politicians. Only time will tell if they have the imagination to make e-petitions work, and the courage to listen – even when the public tells them what they don’t want to hear.

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The Travelling Salesman is back – Part 2

Recently, the ever-intrepid Kristoffer Lawson talked about the first part of his journey in search of the most promising Nordic tech startups. We featured his adventures on the Swedish and Norwegian scene, along with how it feels to drive around Umeå in a windowless jeep in the middle of December.

Now, with more startups, more anecdotes and even some Danish blondes, we present the final, thrilling installment…

Iceland and Denmark: Optimistic and familiar
Iceland, with its famous scenery and videogames industry was an eagerly anticipated destination for Kristoffer. Discussing this little volcanic island Kris says: “I was surprised by how positive everybody was despite the financial situation. Nobody seemed bothered by that…They were all setting up new startups, also the videogame industry was heavily recruiting.” Great vibe aside, Kris admits that some of the island’s rural residents had their doubts about a tech revolution being delivered by city boys who could barely handle a Land Rover.

The final leg of the journey was through Denmark. Here Kristoffer found an interesting and active scene, surprisingly similar to Finland’s. Stopping off at the Copenhagen School of Entrepreneurship our Travelling Salesman had the chance to attend a pitching competition: “It seemed like the whole building was crowded with startups. However, unlike in Finland where people speak in English, everything was in Danish: presentation, pitches, even simple chitchat. VCs were 100% Danish – everybody was tall, blonde and in a good shape – apart from us there were no foreigners in sight. Even so, I didn’t really understand why it wasn’t in English, seeing as eventually the pitches would have to be. Otherwise, one negative thing was a certain lack of ambition: I didn’t see many ideas about to change the world and most stuff felt derivative. It might be a cultural thing, but it seemed like if you claim you are trying to change the world they would look at you like you are a bit crazy. So while there is probably still a bit of work to do, there’s definitely no lack of good models.”

Leaders of the Pack
When Kristoffer stopped talking about the talent on display in Denmark, we asked him to tell us about some of the best practices he witnessed on his epic journey.
“One incubator holds a compulsory breakfast” he says, almost licking his lips with the recollection. “You have to be there at 9am: the idea is to create a situation where people have to speak to each other and find out what everyone’s up to. In another company, every Friday someone pitches an idea – it doesn’t have to be a business idea…They do it because it gets everybody used to pitching and you always learn new things.”

“Two more ideas were a weekly 10 point to-do list where you’re forced to complete at least one thing before lunch and one thing after lunch, and the vu-ja-de, which consists of thinking how to do differently something that has been done already a thousand times before.”

The long and winding road
“Organizing the trip was the difficult part,” Kris admits. “Our idea was that we’d have pre-arranged meet ups. We started the organization process in the summer but some companies responded that they just didn’t have time. Jani Penttinen, entrepreneur and founder of the multilingual social network XihaLife, had some wise words: “Don’t worry, the startup scene is not the same everywhere. Don’t expect every place to be like Helsinki, where it is very easy to do stuff like this.”

Faced with this challenge, Kristoffer decided to take the trip to a whole new level. “In a lot of places I just went knocking on doors – like a real travelling salesman. Some people couldn’t even understand what we were doing. We only wanted to find out about startups – no catch – but perhaps it wasn’t always very clear. Maybe we’ll try and do a few things differently next time around.”

“There were great times though: in Umeå we met some students almost randomly. They knew one guy called Emmanuel, I rang him and explained what we were doing – he loved it immediately! He directed us to the after party of a digital media conference. We found a room full of nice hardware, game designers, artists – all kinds of people. We packed seven of them (plus Emmanuel) into the Land Rover and went for a beer. It was a fantastic evening, Emmanuel told us how he designs startups. It was great because we’d never contacted him before and he’d never heard of us, but he still came out there and helped us – he even got us a discount at the hotel. It felt really, really good. Next morning wasn’t so great though.”

Awestruck by his tireless dedication to the entrepreneur’s cause, we ask Kris: aside from finding out how long does it take to remove stickers from a car (answer: 5 hours), what was the most important lesson you learnt along the way? He hesitates for a moment, before replying: “Don’t give up.”

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