Four crowdsourcing lessons from the Guardian (via Michael Andersen)

I had skimmed this article, on crowd-sourcing, by Michael Andersen few weeks ago and has been looking forward to reading and blogging about it.

Andersen interviewed the key developer from Guardian of London to understand how they got 20,000 plus Brit’s to help uncover the biggest political scandal to hit British shores in decades.

Andersen interviewed the developer, Simon Willison, for tips about deadline-driven software and crowdsourcing. Here are the 4 major tips to successfully engage a crowd for crowdsourcing.

1. Remember your workers are unpaid, so make it fun. They used a four-panel interface to categorize information. (See the image above)
2. Because public (your workers’) attention is fickle, launch immediately.
3. Speed is mandatory, so use a framework for development. Wilson’s team relied on Django, a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
4. Participation will come in one big burst, so have servers ready. Along with Django, they used EC2, the Amazon contract-hosting service for the first time.

SaaS + OpenSource

I have had this post sitting in my draft folder for about a month and half, but fatherhood is funny and busy. Arun and Colleen are away at his grandparents, so this weekend is for blogging!

Now back to the post on SaaS and OpenSource. I am a big OpenSource fan and try to use OS software when ever possible. GIMP is a recent favorite raster design application of mine. Needless to say I was very excited when I read the following on the SourceForge forum

… SourceForge.net Service Operations team is pleased to announce the launch of the first version of a new service offering, “Hosted Apps”.

….the cornerstone of this offering is a scalable and multi-tenant efficient model for hosting Open Source web application instances for the Open Source Software development projects hosted on SourceForge.net.

With the launch of this new Hosted Apps offering, SourceForge.net projects may opt-in to use any of the applications we currently support: phpBB (forums), MediaWiki (a wiki platform), or LimeSurvey (a survey tool).

This is the original forum post . I fully agree with them that “Open Source software development can be accelerated, and more enjoyable to developers, when the soft right tools are available;” moreover I think SaaS is the right model for efficient commercial deployment of Open Source software.

I feel this combination is a match made in heaven! SaaS is the easiest paradigm to take OS software to public. We all know navigating Sourceforge and other OS repositories can be a bit challenging to say the least.

To see the hosted applications go here and check it out.

Tip of the hat to Software Freedom Day celebrations

I have greatly benefited from Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). So a tip of the hat to Software Freedom Day celebrations. 

If you are wondering about the free in FOSS, it is the combination of both free beer and free speech! 

Recently I have been using GIMP, an open source raster tool, a lot for editing and creating web-resources. I think, my employer, QLogitek, should be happy because it has saved the company USD 800 in licensing fee alone!

Longlive FOSS.