Lessons Learned from an Experiment in Crowdsourcing Complex Citizen Engineering Tasks with Amazon Mechanical Turk

America’s dated infrastructure is failing to keep pace with its burgeoning population. In fact, the average grade in ASCE’s (American Society of Civil Engineers) 2013 report card for America’s infrastructure was a D+, with a 3.6 trillion dollar estimated investment needed by 2020 and needs for inspection and assessment that far surpass available manpower. Crowdsourcing is increasingly being seen as one potentially powerful way of increasing the supply of labor for problem solving tasks, but there are a number of concerns over the quality of the data or analysis conducted. This is a significant concern when dealing with civil infrastructure for obvious reasons: flawed data could lead to loss of lives. Our goal was to determine if workers on Mechanical Turk were capable of developing basic engineering analysis skills using only the training afforded by comprehensive tutorials and guided questionnaires.