Joining Cambrian House

Having joined the Cambrian House community, I'm thrilled to promote the idea. CrowdSourcing really is the next big thing. As a turker at Mechanical Turk I missed be able to use my skills as a programmer, and as a computer scientist. The work that I'm offered at at mturk is non-creative, underpayed and simply not for me. At Cambrian House they gave me a share of the company! So yay Cambrian House.

I'll be as active as I can manage to be, vote on projects, an participate in coding on great projects. I like the spirit of the people in the community, it's exactly what I think crowdsourcing can be.

I'll keep you posted on the progress...

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

Legalize CHI!

In his post http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2005-03-25-n43.html Phillipp Lenssen suggested an API for requesting human processing of tasks. Later Amazon launced Mechanical Turk, but that has not been properly realized. Perhaps it is difficult for the reasons pointed out by Chris DiBona in a comment on the Mechanical Turk Officially Closed to Non-US Developers thread by Phillipp.

By the way, I have read somewhere that the generic term is crowd sourcing.

Anyways, the point is that Phillipp suggested CHI, and the question is if something similar has been implemented by someone other than Amazon. I would prefer a CHI-like system where also highly specialized qualifications could by put into play internationally using entities similar to HITs and workers similar to Turkers. This requires a huge amount of people using the system from both the task provider and task completer perspective, otherwise the system wil fail for the reasons pointed out in my previous post.

Naturally all the difficulties of money transfers still apply, but this is a problem that should be dealt withpolitically level, parallel to the development of a system that is implemented for use by the entire world from the start. Implementing CHI world-wide would probably be illegal because any number of tax-laws etc. This instantly makes the problem a juridical one, which is why we need a political initiative that can make such an obviously good idea legal across the globe!

Another possibilty is for Amazon to roll out internationally, and make a bundle of money in the process. Perhaps Amazon has not done so because Amazon earn their money by taking a cut of the wages paid for completing HITs, and if the wages for completing HITs are supressed by the level of wages on the global market, Amazon might make less money per hit. Still I think Amazon would make more money overall, but again I'm a computer scientist not a business analyst.

It could have been great...

In the last few days I've been taking a look at Amazon's Mechanical Turk http://mturk.com, and I've been disappointed to say the least... I had hoped - for a brief moment - to actually make some money solving tasks (called HITs), but that's not how the cookie crumbles.

Mechanical Turk is a system where one set of people (the Requesters) can upload simple tasks that pay money to the internet, and allows another set of people (the Workers of Turkers) to solve those tasks and earn the money.

When I first heard about the Mechanical Turk project I envisioned a truly global marketplace of internationally based Requesters and internationally based Workers. By international I mean that requesters and turkers could in principal be situated anywhere on the planet, completing HITs or creating HITs on equal terms, but that is not how it works :

• Amazon now requires requesters to be U.S. based - Amazon says: "At this time Mechanical Turk does not support Requesters from countries outside the United States". This point is critized on this blog post by Phillipp Lenssen.
  
• You can sign up as a turker no matter which country you live in, and you can complete HITs. But if you're not a U.S. citizen you cannot get access to the money you've earned - Amazon offers: "Transfer your earnings to your U.S. bank account or to your Amazon.com gift certificate balance". So you can still get paid in books I guess.
• Amazon have implemented qualifications, which is a means for allowing workers to specialize in completing certain types of HITs, but there's not a wide variety of qualifications available (only 220 with many repetitions, 29-jan-2008). I'm a computer science student, and I could in principle work on any number of coding projects etc. But such qualifications are not readily available.

Another problem is that the amount of money earned per HIT is ridiculously low. I earned $0.04 in five minutes, which is equivalent to approximately $0.50 an hour, not even enough to buy a chocolate bar. So why even bother to write this? I write this because I think Mechanical Turk is a great idea, only an idea that Amazon has not implemented satisfactory. I expect the problems facing an implementer are (among other things):

• Taxes -Einstein presumably said: "The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax" and I guess it's not a simple task to transfer wages for labour seamlessly around the world. I don't think something like PayPal would solve the problem, as labour would still need to be taxed somehow. Workers must report their income as self-employment income (Wikipedia).
• Few requesters. There seems to be only a few companies dominating the HITs market, which means that there is not enough competition between requesters to drive up the wages. This was pointed out by the paylancer blog, and I expect this problem to be partly due to Amazon only accepting U.S. requesters.

Of course Amazon can not be blamed for failing to providing business opportunities for the entire world, but it's still a shame that mturk is so flawed, because it's a great idea.

See also:

• Wikipedia on Mechanical Turk
• Business Week article on Mechanical Turk
• New York Times article on Mechanical Turk
• Turker Nation - forum for turkers
• Good introduction to Mechanical Turk