Money for workers in crowd sourcing

In this post I'll list sites that propose to offer a solution for crowd sourcing, and who offer their workers monetary pay for their work. I'll analyze the monetary benefits for the workers who solve the tasks through these sites.

The basic idea behind crowd sourcing is that humans solve certain problems that computers are unable to solve. I refer to people solving such tasks as "workers", and those who formulate the tasks as "task providers".

Here is a list of similar projects, listed with the monetary benefits they offer workers:

• InnoCentive: http://www.innocentive.com/. Workers do not automatically receive payment for completed tasks. Rather completed tasks compete with other workers solutions on a "marketplace" where the task providers can award the best prize submitted, presumably with a large amount of money. This means that there is no guarantee that a worker is rewarded for his work. A worker in this scenario resembles a salesman peddling wares on a free market, with the risc of not "selling" anything, more than an actual worker. Presumably the amounts paid to accepted solutions are large, between $100.000 and $1.000.000, according to innocentive.com. Presumably the amount of work performed to receive such a prize is also large, and probably requires specialized and scientific qualifications.
  
• Mechanical turk: http://mturk.com. Workers get paid for each task completed, but at the moment requires the worker to have a U.S. bank account. Also the amount is very small for most tasks. The tasks here a much simpler than the scientific tasks solved on innocentive, and workers are more worker-like. That is, a low but guaranteed wage for a hard days work.
• Cambrian house: http://www.cambrianhouse.com/. Specializes in software development, primarily for the web. Tasks put forth by task providers are ideas for potential software which are rated by a forum. Promising projects are promoted for implementation, and in this sense the task providers are also a kind of workers. Task providers are providers of ideas that have the potential to become products of Cambrian House. Task providers then receive a royalty from Cambrian House if their idea is realized and makes money in the real world. Workers are programmers who make money by helping to implement the chosen ideas.
  

What I like about mturk and the workerpart of Cambrian House, is the incentive for workers to do work, namely that workers get paid for a task completed. I believe that any system that will eventually become widely accepted and change the world is one that offers exactly this incentive, namely guaranteed pay for labour!

Without a steady monetary incentive to work, no work will get done in the long run, because altruism only takes you so far. People have mouths to feed. Besides the organizations behind crowd sourcing benefit economically from the work getting, so it's only fair that workers receive their share (albeit a very small share) of the money.

See also:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowd_sourcing#Recent_examples_of_crowdsourcing