The other day, I had two hours of one-on-one interviews I needed transcribed, and I hired CastingWords to do the task. Before I was a client, I only knew the broad outlines of how they use crowdsourcing (with Mechanical Turk as their broker between themselves and workers). Once I became a client, I was curious, so I really dug into their process. I even did a few of their HITs as a worker to get a feeling for how they do things. I was really impressed by the way they partitioned the task into atomistic bits. I was also impressed by the clarity of their instructions and by their process of escalating levels of verification and review. Furthermore, I was impressed by the overall experience as a client, including an excellent transcript as the outcome. In terms of process, I submit CastingWords as a “best practices” example of how crowdsourcing can be used. This guy is correct (a video I commissioned using crowdsourcing with Fiverr as the broker).
– Eric DeRosia