Crowdsourcing links piecework with freelancers competing to work for pennies
http://www.thestar.com/business/art...reelancers-competing-to-work-for-pennies?bn=1
The emergence of cloud computing is about to change the way we work as much as how we live and consume infotainment.
As pitched to governments, business and consumers, the cloud removes software and storage from individual users’ machines and assembles them in massive remote servers around the world.
But it also allows office workers to work from home computers on assembly-line tasks in competition with thousands of others.
This is casual labour reduced to its most basic form, as individuals from Calcutta to Calgary face off in a virtual jobs game where low cost and speed trump education or experience.
“The whole industry is in very early days,” says trailblazing Australian entrepreneur Matt Barrie, founder of Freelancer.com. “We are on the verge of transforming society and how we run business.”
As the 70 per cent of the world’s population not currently connected gets online, it will grow an army of low-wage freelancers who are doing for the service economy what low-wage factory workers did for manufacturing.
Customer service, software development, writing, marketing and design are just some of the sectors ripe for this revolution.
Rather than housing and staffing a call centre, for example, an increasing number of businesses use services such as LiveOps, which employ individual freelancers as needed.
Most live in developing countries, but many thousands work from homes in North America and Europe.
As call volumes increase for a particular client, the number of individuals available online to answer expands, and vice versa – all in the span of minutes.
As the freelancers work from a remote location, businesses don’t have to pay office costs, benefits or pensions.
Earlier this year, LiveOps announced a partnership with the city of Newark, N.J., to help the unemployed find work.
The service provider currently boasts 20,000 “independent agents” across the U.S.
There are skilled applications for this form of crowdsourcing, as well. For example, Web developers can get their mobile apps tested at bargain-basement rates through outfits like Mob4Hire.
Design work is parceled out this way, too.
Post a request for a new logo and website on Freelancer.com, and, within minutes, hundreds of designers will bid against each other to do the work.
Unveiled by Amazon in 2005, Mechanical Turk is a granddaddy among crowdsourcing sites. The site is named after an 18th century chess-playing “robot” eventually unmasked as a human chess master in disguise.
Mechanical Turk calls each job a HIT, for “human intelligence task.” On a typical day, more than 125,000 HITs get posted on the job boards.
Employers are known as a HIT requesters. They pay, “when satisfied with the results.” People doing the work are called Turkers.
Most HITs require a split-second judgment call and a couple of mouse clicks, like matching an image to a line of text. It’s the sort of job a human can still do faster than a computer.
A typical payment is 1 cent, so a Turker would have to complete 1,025 of these tasks an hour to earn the minimum wage in Ontario.
One recent posting asked for the email address of American author Ben Bradley. The successful Turker was promised 6 cents for the right answer.
Freelancer.com, started in 2004, credits itself with 2.8 million user-workers and 1.2 million jobs to-date. It recently featured a posting from “Bonnielee,” of Renfrew, Ont., who was looking for someone to ghostwrite a novel in seven to 10 days, for between $150 and $200.
“I expect you to be enthusiastic and express this in your work. When I read your work, I want to experience tears of joy or sadness…” Bonnielee posted.
Because the crowdsourcing world prizes anonymity and aliases, identifying individuals is difficult. Several attempts by the Star to register on related job forums went unacknowledged.
Many work agreements on crowdsourcing sites forbid participants from speaking publicly about anything to do with their employment.
In a 2009 survey of who works for Mechanical Turk, New York University professor Panos Ipeirotis found that half of the world’s Turkers live in the United States, while 40 per cent live in India. The bulk of workers, regardless of origin, are in their 20s.
Matt Barrie says 34 per cent of the freelancers on his site live in India. About 11 per cent live in the U.S.
Although Ipeiriotis calculated that the average Turker makes $20 a week, that is just an average. Barrie says that fortunes have been made, thanks to the built-in ratings system on crowdsourcing sites.
The more tasks a freelancer does well, the more money they make, the higher their rating. Highly-rated freelancers get the most job offers, and so often begin hiring others to handle the extra work.
The English-speaking developed world is the largest source of work. It’s why Freelancer.com recently opened a bricks-and-mortar office in the United Kingdom, and will be conducting a public marketing and advertising campaign in Canada in January, says Barrie.
Nancy Schaefer, president of Youth Employment Services in Toronto says some sites allow users to display an online portfolio, which is helpful in landing a full-time job in the bricks-and-mortar world.
But her young clients are looking for “full-time, well-paid, challenging work,” not piecework.
“If your parents are paying for your food and rent, you can afford to get experience this way,” says Schaefer.
Despite the cost benefits, not all businesspeople are enamoured with crowdsourcing, either.
Justin Young, founder and principal of Profis, a Toronto firm specializing in corporate branding, believes crowdsourcing ignores the fact there is “a lot of value in a long-term relationship,” between a team of creative people.
Asking someone to design a logo, “is not a design exercise,” Young says. “It has to be part of a larger business strategy.”
Barrie disagrees. “The customer service ethic is amazing,” he says. “It’s not like what you see in the West. People will offer to do unlimited revisions and go above and beyond expectations.”
Or, as Barrie likes to ask in his marketing sessions: “How would your business change if you had access to virtually unlimited labour at next to no cost?”
The philanthropic side of crowdsourcing
Because a penny goes further in the developing world, San Francisco-based startup Samasource has harnessed crowdsourcing to make a positive social impact.
Over the past two years, the organization says it has paid out more than $1 million (U.S.) in wages to more than 1,500 workers in nine countries in Africa, South Asia and Haiti.
Because most of these places don’t have extensive broadband services, Samasource has built the infrastructure, trained local people and put them to work doing HITs on shifts resembling a regular workday.
“This is a huge opportunity globally to bring people who are marginalized geographically into the workforce,” says Samasource spokesperson Claire Hunsaker.
As people get experience, they are able to turn around and apply for permanent jobs.
“There was this one deaf guy in the early days, and everyone was initially skeptical about him,” recalls Hunsaker of a centre in Kenya. “But he had this really fantastic attention to detail and was really good a cleaning up digital files.”
He now has a full-time job working for Barclay’s Bank.
_______________________________________________________________
More good news for the OWS crowd and the unemployed.
Competition is good for the customer.
http://www.thestar.com/business/art...reelancers-competing-to-work-for-pennies?bn=1
The emergence of cloud computing is about to change the way we work as much as how we live and consume infotainment.
As pitched to governments, business and consumers, the cloud removes software and storage from individual users’ machines and assembles them in massive remote servers around the world.
But it also allows office workers to work from home computers on assembly-line tasks in competition with thousands of others.
This is casual labour reduced to its most basic form, as individuals from Calcutta to Calgary face off in a virtual jobs game where low cost and speed trump education or experience.
“The whole industry is in very early days,” says trailblazing Australian entrepreneur Matt Barrie, founder of Freelancer.com. “We are on the verge of transforming society and how we run business.”
As the 70 per cent of the world’s population not currently connected gets online, it will grow an army of low-wage freelancers who are doing for the service economy what low-wage factory workers did for manufacturing.
Customer service, software development, writing, marketing and design are just some of the sectors ripe for this revolution.
Rather than housing and staffing a call centre, for example, an increasing number of businesses use services such as LiveOps, which employ individual freelancers as needed.
Most live in developing countries, but many thousands work from homes in North America and Europe.
As call volumes increase for a particular client, the number of individuals available online to answer expands, and vice versa – all in the span of minutes.
As the freelancers work from a remote location, businesses don’t have to pay office costs, benefits or pensions.
Earlier this year, LiveOps announced a partnership with the city of Newark, N.J., to help the unemployed find work.
The service provider currently boasts 20,000 “independent agents” across the U.S.
There are skilled applications for this form of crowdsourcing, as well. For example, Web developers can get their mobile apps tested at bargain-basement rates through outfits like Mob4Hire.
Design work is parceled out this way, too.
Post a request for a new logo and website on Freelancer.com, and, within minutes, hundreds of designers will bid against each other to do the work.
Unveiled by Amazon in 2005, Mechanical Turk is a granddaddy among crowdsourcing sites. The site is named after an 18th century chess-playing “robot” eventually unmasked as a human chess master in disguise.
Mechanical Turk calls each job a HIT, for “human intelligence task.” On a typical day, more than 125,000 HITs get posted on the job boards.
Employers are known as a HIT requesters. They pay, “when satisfied with the results.” People doing the work are called Turkers.
Most HITs require a split-second judgment call and a couple of mouse clicks, like matching an image to a line of text. It’s the sort of job a human can still do faster than a computer.
A typical payment is 1 cent, so a Turker would have to complete 1,025 of these tasks an hour to earn the minimum wage in Ontario.
One recent posting asked for the email address of American author Ben Bradley. The successful Turker was promised 6 cents for the right answer.
Freelancer.com, started in 2004, credits itself with 2.8 million user-workers and 1.2 million jobs to-date. It recently featured a posting from “Bonnielee,” of Renfrew, Ont., who was looking for someone to ghostwrite a novel in seven to 10 days, for between $150 and $200.
“I expect you to be enthusiastic and express this in your work. When I read your work, I want to experience tears of joy or sadness…” Bonnielee posted.
Because the crowdsourcing world prizes anonymity and aliases, identifying individuals is difficult. Several attempts by the Star to register on related job forums went unacknowledged.
Many work agreements on crowdsourcing sites forbid participants from speaking publicly about anything to do with their employment.
In a 2009 survey of who works for Mechanical Turk, New York University professor Panos Ipeirotis found that half of the world’s Turkers live in the United States, while 40 per cent live in India. The bulk of workers, regardless of origin, are in their 20s.
Matt Barrie says 34 per cent of the freelancers on his site live in India. About 11 per cent live in the U.S.
Although Ipeiriotis calculated that the average Turker makes $20 a week, that is just an average. Barrie says that fortunes have been made, thanks to the built-in ratings system on crowdsourcing sites.
The more tasks a freelancer does well, the more money they make, the higher their rating. Highly-rated freelancers get the most job offers, and so often begin hiring others to handle the extra work.
The English-speaking developed world is the largest source of work. It’s why Freelancer.com recently opened a bricks-and-mortar office in the United Kingdom, and will be conducting a public marketing and advertising campaign in Canada in January, says Barrie.
Nancy Schaefer, president of Youth Employment Services in Toronto says some sites allow users to display an online portfolio, which is helpful in landing a full-time job in the bricks-and-mortar world.
But her young clients are looking for “full-time, well-paid, challenging work,” not piecework.
“If your parents are paying for your food and rent, you can afford to get experience this way,” says Schaefer.
Despite the cost benefits, not all businesspeople are enamoured with crowdsourcing, either.
Justin Young, founder and principal of Profis, a Toronto firm specializing in corporate branding, believes crowdsourcing ignores the fact there is “a lot of value in a long-term relationship,” between a team of creative people.
Asking someone to design a logo, “is not a design exercise,” Young says. “It has to be part of a larger business strategy.”
Barrie disagrees. “The customer service ethic is amazing,” he says. “It’s not like what you see in the West. People will offer to do unlimited revisions and go above and beyond expectations.”
Or, as Barrie likes to ask in his marketing sessions: “How would your business change if you had access to virtually unlimited labour at next to no cost?”
The philanthropic side of crowdsourcing
Because a penny goes further in the developing world, San Francisco-based startup Samasource has harnessed crowdsourcing to make a positive social impact.
Over the past two years, the organization says it has paid out more than $1 million (U.S.) in wages to more than 1,500 workers in nine countries in Africa, South Asia and Haiti.
Because most of these places don’t have extensive broadband services, Samasource has built the infrastructure, trained local people and put them to work doing HITs on shifts resembling a regular workday.
“This is a huge opportunity globally to bring people who are marginalized geographically into the workforce,” says Samasource spokesperson Claire Hunsaker.
As people get experience, they are able to turn around and apply for permanent jobs.
“There was this one deaf guy in the early days, and everyone was initially skeptical about him,” recalls Hunsaker of a centre in Kenya. “But he had this really fantastic attention to detail and was really good a cleaning up digital files.”
He now has a full-time job working for Barclay’s Bank.
_______________________________________________________________
More good news for the OWS crowd and the unemployed.
Competition is good for the customer.