Dmitry Bezyzvestknykh - Companies and employees interaction via the crowdsourcing platforms

More than three years we have been crowdsourcing in Russia and despite the fact that crowdsourcing is rather trendy and famous word, recently we haven’t met many companies and people who interact with crowdsourcing as customers or as performers. And I would like to know how many of you have ever been involved in crowdsourcing. I mean, could those of you raise your hands who have ever interacted with crowdsourcing as a performer, I mean have shared it’s philosophy, performed any task and got any money as the result, points or admission, at that platform? I see.. [laughing] Oh, now you are three. Three. And how many of you have interacted as a customer, I mean have ever placed an order from the company at a crowdsourcing platform or an individual order? It’s three again. Four. More. Well, statistics we face when we work with companies or attract performers, speaking honestly… There are not many companies and performers, who knows about crowdsourcing. And today I will try to tell you about our experience and tell you about different platforms, interaction with them, which depends on the company size and… on tasks of performer and customer. If you look at the company, which existed when there were no social networks, everything was quite traditional, and then the new ways of communication appeared, I mean that colleagues started to communicate with each other and probably with partners, and then some companies started to use their own social networks, there have even been cases when companies made the employees post something once a week and included it in employee KPI. And crowdsourcing is probably the next step, when the company could address the issue to external performers and use different tools for that. I mean it could be a platform, or other organizations. What kind of task could be solved rather effectively in a non-traditional way? People work remotely, it means that it is difficult to control them, so that a technology or an algorithm is needed. In general one of the most common cases is translation. Yes, people work remotely and can do it very qualitatively in another place. And content generation. Categorization. And there are many cases like these. There are about seventy different cases when person can perform remotely and effectively when solving a task for himself or for companies. All the cases can be divided into 4 types. The first type is when for the task solving you need a knowledge, for example of two foreign languages 61 00:03:00,000 --> 00:03:03,000 to be able to translate. The second type requires the expertise, I mean requires the person to be a good professional, to be the best translator and etc… The fird type is the easiest. That means that anybody who has a device that is needed for task solving, for example computer, needs to login, solve the task and earn or gain something. And the last type, probably most popular type, associated with crowdsourcing is ideas generation. It is an idea for one million, when all people think about the same task, and somebody can solve it, and everybody is happy that they have such a cool idea thanks to crowdsourcing. Our platform “Crowdsystems” is about microtasks, any of you can become a participant in the system. I will tell some facts. We founded the company three years ago. The idea came up this way: we understood that there is a very big problem with getting trade data, I mean data from shops, different channels, networks. And those sources, that were used by companies, were not used by us. I have spent about eight years in FMCG, in sales and marketing, and we used not right sources. I mean that it is possible to get the data faster and more effectively. And as the result we developed a system that unites nowadays more than three hundred thousands of people. As performers we decided to involve usual consumers who do tasks in the shops. It means that each of you, for example, may register in the app right now and find out that for Perekrestok \popular shop in Russia\, for example , there is a task that allows you to earn from one hundred to five hundred rubles by performing some action. Usually it is taking a photo. After people solve the task, we consolidate it. We have a rather big staff of moderators, and also we have freelance moderators, they process all the information and companies get an analytical report the next day after the audit starts, for example, it may be one or two thousands of dots. They get a slice of analytics. In this way we give companies a possibility to get information and analytics practically the same day. This is one of examples, as Janssen, a sector of JNJ, there is an option when a person do a task in a pharmacy, I mean he takes all the photos and creates a kind of a virtual pharmacy, And using these photos an operator can gather up to one thousand parameters about the brand and so on. Also a part of our tasks is more about consumers, it is an investigation when people tell us more information about what do they do and what do they use. In that case, for example, a person from Novosibirsk, Alexey, provides not only his selfie, but also information about his first-aid kit and what drugs he uses to cure diseases. It means the information about a segment. He also told us which pharmacy he goes to. So, in general, with an app for a smartphone one can “go” to any place along with the customer, meaning that when, for example, the latest takes pictures in his (or her) house, one can make judgments about his social class etc, or something else. That cannot always be identified using traditional methods working with customers, we are often called an agency. We don’t really like being called like that because, essentially, we are innovating company, we develop everything ourselves. We are also a research company. Nevertheless as a company which use a traditional model. We come into a client company, guarantee certain time scope, certain quality of the work we do, little bit cheaper, faster, than other companies, but essentially it is a traditional model. And then we complete the task. But if we look at the platform, not all the platforms work the same way. In total there are four types of platforms, and the first type, takes minimum responsibility, meaning that it just connects the client with the service provider. Typical example is a company called Upwork, you must have heard about it. The Companies Elance, Odesk, merged into the company Upwork, pretty big, such companies give the infrastructure that is needed to find a service provider, review his or her rating score, project history, 157 00:07:48,000 --> 00:07:51,000 chat with him/her. And such platforms even can guarantee payments. But not more than that. Next type of companies takes more responsibility. This type of a company can be called “company – facilitator”. It is when a company has an expertise in working with clients, and this company launches a competition. Meaning organizes a competition, for example, for the best design or the best IT - product, and at the end the company pays only for the best product (work), for the product (work), that was judged the best by the platform itself, or, by the Company-client itself. Next type is a more complex type of companies. Tthe best example of it is Amazon where you as a service-provider can register and perform a very simple tasks. As, for example judge pictures: whether they contain any harmful information, any offensive information, or for example what animal is depicted. At Amazon they use this system largely to perform the tasks, which cannot be performed by algorithms, for example identify an irony, or, identify what is depicted on a picture. Meaning they take a larger task that they have at their company and break it into microtasks. And people do these microtasks. Then they gather it and send it. The only problem is that there is no quality guarantee, companies get just the result they get. And of course this platform uses additional quality developments. For example if three people said that it is a dog, it most probably is a dog, even if one person said that it is not, then a task will be checked additionally, and by this way quality is improved. получается. And the last type is a non-standard type, that we use, and is more common for a big company, when a company gets a service by some parameters and the platform decides how it will provide a service, use it’s skills. Here is a very interesting example – a company TopCoder. It is more than ten years old and it developes difficult projects, big IT-projects for big companies. 202 00:10:03,000 --> 00:10:06,000 That is due to the fact that in general people in IT business started freelance earlier than others and etc., It divides very difficult unit into several tasks and organizes competitions or contracts and in the end has all the difficult project made of small parts. This company was compared to huge companies such as IBM, by some difficult tasks, and it often won in terms of deadlines, quality, because it could use several millions professionals, which have been already united for more than ten years. In general this is all information I would like to share, except two trends, at these two platforms. The first trend is about big companies only begins to work with crowdsourcing platforms. The companies that we work with for the first or second year begin to create a staff which works with our platform and similar platforms. In general I think that in some time they will be able to manage the tasks by the model, because they already know about methodology, understand how does it work and what content they may get from people. For the big company it would be logical to start and then to “move down”. But for small business the model of course is more clear and simple, because they can provide resources which will search for people, for example. And the second trend is simplification of the task. In the beginning we asked a person to do everything he or she can do at the spot. He took photos, counted. We explained how to count brands and etc. He spent an hour there and we checked that from ten people whom we involved only one did the task, because only one was willing and ready to spend this time. After simplification everything became more interesting for performer. He or she makes everything in five minutes and leaves, and we process this task later not entirely in two or three hours, but by several moderators and by parts for five or ten minutes of work. It is easier and faster and more effective. All platforms that will meet a big content, will specialize In simplification, will divide the content and collect all together. This is the second trend. I wish you to take part in the systems as a performer. There are not only simple tasks, but also executive tasks. I mean platforms where you can use a consultation and which may be interested for development some skills.

At the same time as a company, please start to work with crowdsourcing, because it is a market, not a big one, but developing. There are forecasts that it will be from thirty to forty percents of all the work force in several years. And now I would like to offer you to take part in our platform right now, download the app and find a task at this address, answer several questions and earn fifty rubles. [laughing] [Inaudible] [Inaudible] [laughing] Thank you.