Crowdsourcing on AfriAnnotate
Most annotation platforms treat "the crowd" as a licensing tier or an external marketplace. AfriAnnotate treats it as the point: community dataset work is crowd work, and the platform ships everything a community-scale campaign needs — discovery, consented joining, coordination, credit, payment, and motivation — as one integrated, auditable system.
What ships, end to end
| Capability | What it means in practice | Page |
|---|---|---|
| A public catalog | Public projects appear in Discover with search, filters, and the same grid/list views as the rest of the platform. Contributors find work; projects find people. | Discover & joining |
| Consented, controlled joining | One-click joins (or owner-reviewed requests), with the project's consent agreements signed inside the join flow and enforced again at annotation time. Capacity caps, per-project mobile exposure, roster management. | Discover & joining |
| Field coordination | Facilitators — coordinator-appointed contributors with attributed invite links and per-cohort progress and payment rollups. Built for how field campaigns actually run. | Facilitators |
| Automatic credit | Every piece of validated work — clips, votes, accepted prompts — earns idempotent entries in an append-only ledger the moment the community validates it. | Contributions & payment |
| Real payment support | Owner-declared rate cards in any currency (including airtime), contributor-visible statements, payout CSVs per period — grouped by facilitator where that's how money flows. | Contributions & payment |
| Motivation without surveillance | Personal daily goals and streaks; leaderboards that are opt-in with aliases; public per-language progress. Nothing about a contributor is public by default. | Goals & progress |
Why it's safe to open your project to strangers
Crowdsourcing fails when openness costs control. Here it doesn't:
- Contributors are not members. A contributor can annotate — and sees only their own work — but holds no organization permissions, can't read the roster, and costs the org nothing. Management stays with managers.
- Consent is enforced server-side. A direct API call from someone who never signed the project's agreements hits the same wall as the UI.
- The crowd's quality is measured like everyone else's. Contributor work flows through the same review queues, agreement metrics, and (for speech) automated QC + crowd validation as member work.
- Everything is attributable. Joins, consents, appointments, credits — recorded, auditable, exportable.
Where speech fits
Speech campaigns are the deepest integration of crowdsourcing on the platform — the crowd records, validates, writes prompts, and gets paid, through one pipeline. That story has its own section.