One Saturday evening we were discussing ways to create jobs in Ukraine so the local population could support themselves, now so meany jobs got lost due to the war. And soon enough we came up with a couple of possibilities ranging from: programming bootcamps to web design courses but all of these had limitations. Either: they took to long to train someone for, required expensive hardware or where simply impractical.
The Breakthrough
A breakthrough came in June of 2022, when I went to a tech related tradeshow and attended a presentation on machine learning. Their, the presenter boasted about a algorithm that enabled a machine to prune leaves from cucumber plants using a library of manually annotated pictures. “How meany pictures? I just had to ask the presenter. “About 100.000, all annotated by hand with the help of overseas labour” he said.
I’m sure you can imagine I had a Aha moment! So after coming home I checked out all that I could find about this process called: “data annotation” and I found out it is both: an in demand skill, quick to train some-one on and requires no expensive tools besides a laptop! BINGO – we have found ourselves a winner!
During the buildout stage however, I came to the conclusion that I could, and maybe even should expand this project on a much bigger global scale. As I was sure there where many more people from developing countries that would love to have a entry level job that they could use as a stepping stone to become a: data engineer, programmer or BI professional down the road instead of low skill, low value added work as labourers, miners or being flat-out unemployed. Enabling both the individual and a developing nations economy in one fell swoop!
So I started doing even more research & contacted a old school buddy of mine that is a expert website builder with the idea of starting a charity! Where we would teach people from Ukraine, India and maybe a view other countries data annotation so they could become freelance data annotators! And to help them find employment afterwards we would build this platform called: “annotation-hub” where they could advertise their services and find employment.
Building the platform
Great idea! And with my old schoolfriend agreeing on working on the project at a reduced rate I started it in October of 2022! Only to find out that: Ukrainian data annotation companies were already doing this, finding sponsors was not as easy as I thought it would be and actually finding a small to medium size data annotation company to supply us with the data annotation teachers we needed was surprisingly hard as well!
However, I already paid my friend to build this annotation-hub platform, so there was no turning back! I just had to make use of it somehow! So under the motto of: when life gives you lemons just make lemonade! I was like: well, considering it is quite hard to find all these middle and smaller size data annotation companies on Google, lets adjust the platform a bit and make it primarily agency-focused instead with the possibility of freelancers to join as well.
So I did just that. And you have the fruit of my labour right in front of you right now! That is the full story of how Annotation-hub got started!