søndag den 17. juni 2007

Human Computation

In this 'Talk' Louis unveils to the viewer his actually implemented tools for what I might call 'Making work fun'. Something I recently experimented with in using elements of a game in combination with an actual workproces.

In my current employment I have this task of optimizing the flow of a editing images for real estate sales.

How can I make this process feel like a game? - well first you'd have to watch the 'talk' : http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8246463980976635143&q=tech+talk&total=878&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=0

I think I would first try to apply one of the game structures.. maybe the 'synchronous' approach. Have 1 worker edit the actual image and another verify it. This is how the process actual is implemented already. A worker edits the image to fulfill some specifications. Say make the sky appear blue, remove anything unwanted in the picture and so on. Then the QA guy looks at the image and comes with corrections of sorts.

So, the worker gets paid for any image that can be used. He gets rewarded for some effort, with is a common gaming element. Although, how do we make this achievement more interactive and most important FASTER.

Well, one thing we could do is have the QA and the worker, player 1 & 2 if you will, work synchronously. But having 2 employees for a task that can be solved by just 1 is very expensive, therefore we would rather eliminate the QA as a postion and give that task to each of the workers.

By eliminating the QA per se, we can have double the output, but this puts strain on the actual control of the work, because the workers are on the same level and authority is gone. Instead we HAVE to rely on the workers not to 'cheat'. Well this is not a big problem in this case, since in the end, the customers can really easily fulfill the QA task, we just have to have a means of backtracking to the workers involved.

I have to find a concrete implementation of something similar, the ESP game is too simple to use as a model, not that it's no ingenious, it HAS to be simple, because any 1 should be able to do it.

Now we have requirements for the players, that are:
1. has to have skills with photoediting
2. can read/write english and communicate with her peer

In a scenario, the two workers would work on 1 input each parralel, but the tasks would not take an eqaul amount of time to complete, so there's our first problem to be solved. How do we align the proces of each worker and make sure that QA becomes an interactive/dynamic task done by the workers in one effort.

I'll have to research this some more.