Simon Willison – Building crowdsourcing applications

Simon Willison — Building crowdsourcing applications

• In: Resources
• By:Guy Leech
• July 19, 2010

Web Directions @media 2010, Southbank Centre London, June 10 1.40pm.

• Audio record­ing of session
• Presentation slides
• Session descrip­tion
• About Simon Willison

Presentation slides

Session descrip­tion

Crowdsourcing appli­ca­tions take indi­gestible tasks and break them down into digestible pieces, enabling a group to help plough through large scale projects in much shorter peri­ods of time.

Designing and build­ing crowd­sourc­ing appli­ca­tions incor­po­rates a fas­ci­nat­ing range of chal­lenges, from usabil­ity, psy­chol­ogy and inter­ac­tion design to scal­ing appli­ca­tions for surges of traf­fic — all the while ensur­ing that con­trib­u­tors are rewarded, good behav­iour is encour­aged and the result­ing data comes out in a use­ful format.

This talk will dis­cuss lessons learned build­ing seri­ous crowd­sourc­ing appli­ca­tions on news­room sched­ules at the Guardian, and play­ful crowd­sourc­ing fea­tures for WildlifeNearYou​.com.

About Simon Willison

Simon Willison is a developer, speaker, writer and all-round web technology enthusiast. Simon works for Guardian News and Media as a software architect for guardian.co.uk and the Guardian Open Platform. Before joining the Guardian Simon worked as a consultant for clients that included the BBC, Automattic and GCap Media.

Simon is a past member of Yahoo!’s Technology Development team, where his projects included the initial prototype of FireEagle, Yahoo!’s location broker API. Prior to Yahoo! he worked at the Lawrence Journal-World, an award winning local newspaper in Kansas.

Simon is a co-creator of the Django web framework, and a passionate advocate for Open Source and standards-based development. He maintains a popular Web development blog at

Follow Simon on Twitter: @simonw

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