Jan, 2011, DAVID J. CORD HELSINKI T IMES: The internet is not only changing how we work, but how work is defined. Not all workers work for pay, and not all employers need employees. USE of electronic communications is changing the face of labour. Today, teleconferencing and telecommuting are commonplace, making geographical location much less relevant and changing the way in which many tasks are delegated and performed. Open source-working MySQL set the standard. It was largely an open-source project, meaning that thousands of people collaborated on it and thousands of people benefi ted from it. The company made this labour-saving tool profi table through dual licensing. Its users can get the software free as long as they agree to release publicly any moderated versions they make. If they want to keep their work proprietary, they need to pay for a license. Co-founder Michael Widenius earned millions of euros when MySQL was sold. The question is immediately raised: why will people volunteer their time and expertise in such projects when the benefi ts go to someone else? The answer is not quite so simple. “There is always a payment involved; people hardly ever work without some form of compensation,” says Ville Miettinen, the CEO of Microtask. “However, the payment may be in the form of external goodwill, or the person may have an internal source of motivation such as entertainment, personal interest, or that they want to make the world a better place. It is not practical to think that people do work ‘for free’.” Mikko Puhakka, one of Finland’s foremost experts on open-source labour, gives another example. “The guiding principle is called meritocracy, so you earn the respect of peers,” he says. “Another answer is that a growing number of companies allow their employees to participate in these projects in order for them to develop their skills in certain technology areas.” Crowdsourcing Then there is crowdsourcing, taking tasks traditionally performed by an employee and outsourcing them through an open call to a large group of people. Amazon was one of the first practitioners of this through Mechanical Turk, which has thousands of relatively simple tasks like tagging photos open to people to perform over the internet. Miettinen’s company Microtask specialises in this new method. “There are two main important angles to crowdsourcing: motivating people, and the logistics of contributing,” explains Miettinen. “The internet itself doesn’t provide much of anything new or special on the motivational side. However, the net makes the logistics of working so much more effi cient.” By way of example, he explains the building of a firestation in a small village. Traditionally each villager would come and offer a day of labour to build the structure. “It is not practical for people to contribute just by hitting one nail into the wall,” he says. “On the internet these problems of participation disappear, in some cases entirely. In a way, it’s possible to get tens of thousands of ‘nails’ hit in a few seconds, if necessary.” Not every project can work in such a manner, but the method is adaptive. Miettinen names projects that can be meaningfully subdivided into simple tasks such as distributed proofreading and projects that can be replicated by a large number of people such as design contests. Puhakka lists pro-jects that are easily managed through networks, such as the production of digital goods. The future Miettinen says that the whole concept of “working” will change through this new method of utilising labour. It is changing how both purchasers and providers of labour interact to complete tasks. “We will be increasingly organising tasks around global talent pools rather than local resources,” says Puhakka. “Geographical regions, where you choose to live, will be less important than your ability to work through the web. This is a huge change. Examples of a similar magnitude can be seen in the industrial revolution and the main structural changes in society can be mirrored from those experiences.” |