Work From Home Malta

CEO of CloudCrowd has just released an update regarding recent issues and work availability.

Dear CloudCrowd Workers,

I'd like to give you another update on progress. You have all been very patient as we implement various infrastructure improvements.

Credibility

I'd like to talk first about Credibility. Today, we finished recalculating everyone's Credibility using revised algorithms that we believe are significantly more accurate. In about 33% of the cases, we adjusted a Credibility down, and in about 33% of the Cases, we adjusted a Credibility up. We don't like doing this kind of arbitrary change, because we know it's jarring, and we hope to avoid it in the future.

Why do it at all? Well, we're trying to address a very fundamental issue: Bad work needs to be rejected, and Good work should be approved. That isn't happening enough yet. Many of you have shared with us the frustration of getting work that you believed was absolutely correct rejected. When that happens incorrectly, it's often because someone who disagreed with you has an overly generous Credibility rating.

The main solution is to tighten things up. If you earn a Credibility of 80 and you're in disagreement with someone with a Credibility of 30, you will "win" the decision. If they have an improperly earned Credibility of 90, you're in jeopardy of losing.

As a result, we're continuing to evolve both the basic Credibility engine and the tools we use to improve it. One of the biggest new tools is what we're calling Check Questions

Check Questions
On Tuesday, we started to inject a small number of "canned" questions into the mix. Each Worker is programmed to get a small number of these Check Questions mixed in to their regular questions. Each CQ has been carefully evaluated, mainly to determine if it's sufficiently unambiguous. Most CQ's involve testing to see whether a submission that should be Rejected is properly Rejected, but some involve testing whether, for example, an Excellent piece of work gets a Good or Excellent grade from its Reviewer.

The penalty for failing a Check Question is tough: we reduce your Credibility to 25 and put you on Probation. Our hard argument is that if you're following the directions, you won't have any problem ace'ing these questions. If you get them right, we'll pay you for them just as if they were real questions

Review & Appeal
But what if you think we were wrong? We are getting close to implementing an Appeal system that will allow you to appeal the ones you think were Rejected wrongly. We're also about to put in a basic solution you can use to view your old work, reviewing both the answer you gave and the answer the Crowd concluded was right.

Big Drops in Credibility
One thing that has been noted is how severely Credibility can drop. There are two ways you can lose a great deal of Credibility all at once. One way is if you blow a Check Question. The other is if an Administrator happens to hand-review a piece of work you did, enters an answer, and the answer disagrees with yours. In both of these scenarios, you can lose 75 points instantly. The logic in both is the same. If you're in serious disagreement with known right answers, we can't count on your work as much as we had thought. You might ask "what if the Administrator is wrong?" It doesn't happen much, because the only people doing Administration right now are very strong on this subject matter. However, it has been seen a couple times to happen. That's another good situation where Appeal will be useful.

Upcoming Projects
By the end of this week, we will post a new project which has to do with finding online data to populate a catalog. We also should have a lot of new tasks, as soon as we get some of the above items in place. In addition, we're working on a feature we call Credentialing. Once we have that, we'll be able to get the Rewrite tasks back up.

New Blog & Forums
I'm pleased to report that we have gotten our Blog up. Information like this letter will be posted to the Blog, and we'll be shifting our forums from Facebook to our own forum setup.

Overall
Thanks again for your patience. We really aren't set up to handle this large a Worker base, and it shows. We're delighted to have this level of interest, and we hope you'll be patient as we continue to make major improvements. I am convinced that we will build this into a huge platform offering an incredibly rich selection of tasks and projects to Workers. Now if we can just get through our childhood and adolescence!

Respectfully,
Alex Edelstein
CEO
CloudCrowd