Berkman Center Webinar Discusses Crowdsourcing
In my post, Crowdsourcing Tedious Tasks for Fun and (Non)Profit, I discussed how the Sunlight Foundation was using website visitors to get tasks done a little bit at a time.
What I neglected to mention was that Amazon has had a similar project in place for almost four years: Amazon Mechanical Turk. Instead of using volunteers, this service pays people tiny amounts ($0.01 to $0.05 is typical) for each Human Intelligence Task (HIT) that they complete. Critics have referred to Amazon Mechnical Turk as a virtual sweatshop because of the minimum wage, workers compensation, and overtime laws that are avoided.
Recently, the Berkman Center hosted a session that discussed these issues: HIT me baby one more time, Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Amazon Mechanical Turk. In this webinar, Aaron Shaw explains what Amazon Mechanical Turk is, its implications on the labor market, and who is using it. (Hint: it's not just middle-income people using it to make some extra cash.) - K
