Microwork
Microwork is a series of many small tasks which together comprise a large unified project, and it is completed by many people over the Internet.
[3] It is most often used to describe tasks for which no efficient algorithm has been devised, and require human intelligence to complete reliably.
[8] Toloka and Amazon Mechanical Turk are examples of micro work markets, and they allow workers to choose and perform simple tasks online, reporting directly through the platform to receive payments in exchange.
A task can be as complex as algorithm writing or as simple as labelling photos or videos, describing products, or transcribing scanned documents.
They are also used to accurately translate or transcribe audio clips and pictures, since these are activities that are better suited to humans than computers.
These are used both for practical data conversion purposes, but also to improve upon and test the fidelity of machine learning algorithms.
[13] Other than the manipulation of data, these services are also a good platform for reaching a large population for social studies and surveys since they make it easy to offer monetary incentives.
are currently crowdsourcing some of their work through CrowdFlower, a company that specializes in allocating jobs for foreign and local crowd workers.
Through services like Samasource work and wealth are distributed from companies in developed countries to a large volume of families in poverty, especially women and youth who would otherwise not be able to generate income.
For employers, microtasking services provide a platform to quickly get a project online and start receiving results from many workers at the same time.
[18][26] Because global services outsource work to underdeveloped or developing regions, competitive pricing and task completion could result in lower wages.
[27] The possibility also exists for true brick and mortar sweatshops to exploit microtasking services by enlisting those that are too poor to afford a computer of their own and aggregating their work and wages.
[23][24] However, while the dispersed geography of microwork can be used to keep wages low, the very networks that fragment the labour process can also be used by workers for organising and resistance.
[28] The San Francisco-based company CrowdFlower has facilitated outsourcing digital tasks to countries with poverty to stimulate their local economies.
The crowdsourcing company has a partnership with Samasource, a non-profit organization that brings computer based work to developing countries, they have currently outsourced millions of repetitive microwork to the Kenyan refugee camps.
