dhaas

The docs are hosted by readthedocs, so for those looking, they can still be found here: http://django.readthedocs.org/en/1.8.x/

We have an issue open to improve the journalism exaple: https://github.com/unlimitedlabs/orchestra/issues/32. If you have concrete suggestions for how to make it better, we'd love to hear them--especially for documentation, which can always use work!

Also feel free to reach out to us on gitter (https://gitter.im/unlimitedlabs/orchestra) if you're having trouble getting your local setup to run the workflow and we can talk through the details.

Thanks for the feedback!

Your comment about embedding external QA workflows is super interesting. Right now Orchestra does support what we call 'Review Policies', which allow you to specify that a given workflow step be reviewed k times, or with probability X, or by specific expert Z. But it would be interesting to think of whole workflows for QA.

Re: getting started, yeah, we're working on a script--turns out cross-platform support is hard!

They don't come in the box, but you're free to hire musicians for your workflows!

We haven't built that integration yet, but it's totally possible! Really all it should take is a Machine Step that calls out from Python to, say, Pivotal's APIs (https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pivotaltracker).

Products like Jira help organize tasks within workflows, but don't automate any that organization. Orchestra takes care of things like "which reporter should I assign to a new story?" without requiring humans to make those decisions.

Research from the Flash teams project that I mentioned in another comment (http://stanfordhci.github.io/flash-teams/index.html) has shown that this type of automation can decrease end-to-end workflow time by as much as 2x!

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.

(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.