Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
orchestra.unlimitedlabs.com
Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
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Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#2Hi, Hacker News!
Today we’re excited to be making our first contribution back to the tech community by open sourcing Orchestra, a system for coordinating project teams of experts and machines. It can be used to reimagine and implement all sorts of workflows, from professional services (like legal, design, and data analysis) to new product experiences (like M from Facebook). Orchestra is based upon years of research into machine-mediated expert teams. We hope you’ll come up with new and creative ways of using it!
At Unlimited Labs, we’re excited about building a brighter future of work and are currently building our first product on top of Orchestra. We’d love to answer any questions you have on here, or feel free to email the team at hello@unlimitedlabs.com!
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#3(Orchestra dev here)
If you're curious how it can be used, Daniel Haas put together a wonderful example of how Orchestra could be used in a newsroom:
http://orchestra.readthedocs.org/en/latest/example_use.html
Happy to take questions!
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#4Great stuff! For now it seems like this leaves out the job of finding crowd workers. Could it be possible to do something like designing microtasks in MTurk and "stitching" the workflow together using Orchestra?
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#5Great stuff! For now it seems like this leaves out the job of finding crowd workers. Could it be possible to do something like designing microtasks in MTurk and "stitching" the workflow together using Orchestra?
(Orchestra dev here too!) That's a great question. We're hoping that emerging online expert communities like Upwork or Dribbble will make it easier and easier to find experts suited to the work, but it's definitely not a solved problem (or tech recruiting would be so much easier!).
Re: MTurk, there's nothing stopping you from stitching microtasks together with Orchestra, but I think that undersells Orchestra's strengths (e.g., collaboration among workers) a bit.
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#6This is very exciting!
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#7This seems very cool - are there case studies of adopting this type of workflow for complex projects?
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#8This seems very cool!!!
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#9This seems very cool - are there case studies of adopting this type of workflow for complex projects?
I don't know of any formal case studies, but Adam Marcus and myself (two devs on the project) worked on a large-scale workflow at GoDaddy where we automatically organized data extraction experts into hierarchies of review. That work actually got published at a Databases conference: see Adam's nice summary here: http://blog.marcua.net/post/128120315677
On the research side of things, the flash teams work by Daniela Retelny at Stanford (http://stanfordhci.github.io/flash-teams/) has done great proof-of-concept things like build an app in a day with distributed teams.
Re: Orchestra: An open-source system to orchestrate teams of experts and machines
#10This might seem a dumb question, but can you talk about how this improves on existing productivity workflows? Does it integrate with tasking systems like Jira or is this meant to be a complete a replacement?
It seems high-level (and great) I'm just curious what implementing it "in the field" would look like.