History: Crowd motivation

Challenges in crowd motivation:

-Haiti response:
it became hard to keep workers motivated as the process went on before funding came online. Personal relationships really helped keep people going
-Using social media helped both recruit people and provide a positive motivation for people coming into the work in a more personal manner

MTurk: Money is the main motivator
Other motivation besides money:
-community recognition
-personal achievement
-competition (who does the most tasks wins)
-stat maintenance keeps people shooting for a goal ("competing" with themselves going forward)

Feedback loop is important for people as an extra motivation. Whether its:
-markup of their ESL output
-translation back and forth view for the Monolingual contributing
-People on Livemocha want to learn a language and this is a great motivator
-positive feedback and access to more advanced work based on previous performance was a very good tool with people on MTurk

There is an effect of national/language pride in low density language tasks. People are proud to help get their language out there and build resources for it. Here are some quotes from people who were doing language tasks in their native languages:
“It’s really nice to remind me what I am”
“I am hoping that MTurk will provide more opportunities for
translations in Spanish!”
“What about localizing mturk in different languages so that any one
can easily work in mturk”
“It is a very enjoyable thing to do research in linguistics.”
“I’m an outlier, because I love languages so much, but you can count
me in, I suppose. Good luck with your research.”
“Used to be fluent in Latin, but it’s hard to stay in practice with a
dead language.”
“Tamil is my mother tongue ... the creativity will shine in mother tongue only.”
“This is not only work. It can improve our knowledge also”

How much of the motivation can be automated into the process and how much of it will and has to remain personal relationship driven. How scalable are these relationship models to larger and larger crowds.

Going back to disaster related crowdsourcing, they found an effect of how Newsmaking the issue was related to how much interest there was in helping out.

There is a strong confound of incentive quantity and the standards of living in the countries where language is spoken. For Indian languages you can get away with paying less than, say, Japanese or Korean.

At Kiva.org they found that there are certain demographics for volunteers that they are recruiting...so middle aged professionals and retirees, as well as young mothers are great, but students tend to be quite bad in terms of long-term commitment

Community is important. Even on MTurk people are forming communities on turkernation to discuss the work they do and other related matters. Giving people good senses of community is very good.

Giving people a humanitarian reason for participating is great. Burch, when collecting data for Pakistani SMS translation, told people what the information would be used for and people seemed to really respond on a personal level to the work.

To what extent can games (with a purpose) be used to motivate people for language translation tasks?
-thinking in terms of Re-Capture and Image labeling task
-Educational or fun game for translation? What are the annotations or other information that can be generated quickly and be quite useful?
-there has been work done (for example, CrowdFlower) with putting tasks into games like Farmville
-the payments here are in fake currency related to the games, so the game makers get money from the people posting the tasks but don't have to worry about passing real money to players. This allows people in other countries to participate more easily without needing a bank account or credit card.