SUMMARY

Crowdsourcing has become a powerful tool for uniting groups of people to solve large-scale problems.  With modern crowdsourcing platforms, we can fund a new invention, create a comprehensive online encyclopedia, or even locate a missing airplane.  Yet most crowdsourcing platforms today still require that individuals make their contributions independently and separately of the other crowd workers.  Can we expand the horizons of what crowdsourcing can achieve by enabling crowdsourced workers to collaborate on more complex, interdependent projects?  

Flash Teams is a project I worked on during the summer of 2014 as a research intern in the Stanford Human Computer Interaction Group.  Flash teams leverage online labor markets (such as Upwork) to enable expert workers to collaborate on and complete complex and interdependent projects.  While on the project, I helped expand the existing Flash Teams to entire Flash Organizations by developing strategies to scale-up Foundry, a web platform that gathers workers and manages them as they follow a structured workflow.  In addition, I ran multiple pilot studies with ODesk workers, designed and implemented the second iteration of Foundry, and I did the voiceover in the video to the right!