Mycroft: Open source peer production in convenient banner form

In his classic article "Coase's Penguin," Yochai Benkler makes the argument that two of the key features of successful open source projects is that they decompose tasks into very small parts or problems, which can be executed or answered relatively easily; and they can draw upon a very large labor pool. (I talk about Benkler's work here; here's Benkler's own abstract of the article.)

Today I ran across something called Mycroft, a still-in-beta product developed by some people at Berkeley. Basically, it consists of a banner-- like the banner ads you see on many Web sites-- that serves up a question: What is this piece of scanned text? How would you describe this picture?

At first, I assumed it was some kind of scam, only there was no "click here to win a free iPod!" button. Turns out it's essentially a system that tries to capitalize on Benkler's insight. (It's a bit like Clickworkers, only generalized.)

As the site explains,

One of you has a problem to solve that your computer can't figure out. And you could use 10 more people like yourself to get the job done. Or how about a million? Even the most powerful computer can't tell what messy handwriting really says or whether the sunset photo on your last roll is very good. But you can, without even trying. Each of you has a wealth of valuable knowledge and skills that other people are searching for - and you might not even know it. We're here to bring you together.

We take a large, complicated job and divide it in to friendly, manageable chunks. We call them puzzles, and each one takes only a few seconds to solve. We serve them up to you in the space where that annoying web ad used to be. Without ever leaving the web page you were looking at, you can contribute what you know to the job that needs to be done, just by answering a few questions in the Mycroft banner.

Taking a complex task, dividing it into a lot of little parts that only take a few seconds to look at and respond to, then sending the pieces out to millions of people: it's open source lite (which is not to speak ill of it). It'll be interesting to see if it actually turns into something. Certainly it's an intriguing idea.

And where's the name come from?

The Mycroft Network is named after Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes' older and wiser brother.

Technorati Tags: cooperation, collaboration, Web 2.0, social software, open source

Comments

[Benjamin Hill]

Thanks for the post! Glad you like the concept - we are hard at work this term testing out various strategies to see if it is viable.

(Shameless begging - if anyone out there would like to help us with our initial testing, and has a blog or website that they can host a banner on for 3 weeks, let us know: mycroftnetwork@gmail.com)

Also, we are looking for other tasks (both industry and non-profit) that we can start investigating - we hope to move beyond what Amazon's mechanical turk is doing right now.

[Axel]

Thanks Alex. This is really cool and a fun way to help out people!

[Shannon Clark]

This is very similar (though not entirely) to Amazon.com's Mechanical Turk see http://mturk.amazon.com - what they call "artificial Artificial Intelligence"

[Judd Antin]

It is similar to Mturk in its root principals, but Mycroft sports a key difference: it lives on websites you already visit. You can interact with Mycroft without ever leaving the site that hosts it. We think that enables a lot of very, very cool stuff.