Fed agency using Crowdflower & Amazon Mechanical Turk?

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Permalink Reply by Steve Cottle on July 20, 2012 at 4:24pm

Hi Justin,

I haven't heard of anyone using those specific services, but the State Dept's Virtual Student Foreign Service was moving in the direction of building a cloud of student interns who could work on projects for embassies/missions around the world, like an in-house crowd-sourcing service. I wrote a short case in a larger report last year. You can find it on page 19 here.

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Permalink Reply by GovLoop on July 21, 2012 at 10:59am

Reach out to Crowdflower - I'd heard they had done some translation work during a couple crisis (I think Haiti) for either gov't agencies or quasi-government groups

I think while can make sense to do, obviously there's a little sensitive of it for gov't agencies based on people outside the U.S. doing the work (which I think you can control) and the wages (it's almost too cheap/too good of a deal).  But I think it's an awesome way to go for certain tasks

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Permalink Reply by Chris Cairns on July 23, 2012 at 3:33pm

This is a good question, Justin.  I've been wondering lately ways that federal agencies could use a service like Crowdflower, Mechanical Turk and Microtask.

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Permalink Reply by John Hoskins on September 19, 2012 at 7:04pm

Hi Justin;

We have a couple good examples of Federal Agencies using and evaluating Mechanical Turk. Currently Army Research Labs used us to annotate short video clips for a DARPA project, DARPA is using us to adjust machine translation technology to recognize spoken language better. Finally, US Copyright Office is investigating digitizing and annotating its card catalog to bring those resources online.

ARL used us directly, DARPA Language project is through Raytheon, and US Copyright is investigating several of our Partners for solutions.

John

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