Crowdsourcing For Dummies

Chapter 8

Managing with Microtasks

In This Chapter

Knowing which jobs to break down into microtasks

Going through the microtasking process

Taking the plunge with Mechanical Turk

When you start to microtask, looking carefully at a large job and breaking it down into small tasks that the crowd can carry out, you probably won’t have to worry about the details of the job. You give your job to a crowdsourcing firm. This firm prepares it for a crowdmarket, places it on that market, and then returns the complete job to you.

Microtasking is both the simplest and most demanding form of crowdsourcing: simple because it produces simple little tasks that should be easy to describe and easy to do; demanding because it’s often hard to create those little tasks.

This chapter gives you a full picture of the microtasking process. Even though you personally may not prepare jobs for microtasking, you’ll find it useful to see how microtasking is done and how microtasking platforms prepare jobs to be microtasked. Microtasking has the potential to have the greatest impact on businesses and organisations because it expands the scope of work, allowing you to do things you couldn’t do before.

Identifying ...