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.

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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