The Rise of Crowd Sourcing

Wired showed in a recent article entitled the Rise of Crowd Sourcing how lower transaction costs combined with rising numbers of constantly plugged in knowledge workers makes outsourcing of previously unpractical jobs possible. Now with more advanced and refined sharing and matching mechanisms collaboration can happen transcending national and more importantly organizational barriers.

Most interestingly in this context seems Amazon’s Mechanical Turk” a web-based marketplace that helps companies find people to perform tasks computers are generally bad at. Tasks which are available there range from “identifying items in a photograph, skimming real estate documents to find identifying information, writing short product descriptions, transcribing podcasts. Amazon calls the tasks HITs (human intelligence tasks); they’re designed to require very little time, and consequently they offer very little compensation – most from a few cents to a few dollars”.

There is more to come on OpenBusiness on this topic as this will create a more open, felxible and eclectic style of production and labor in general.