for those interested in more on this topic, below are two papers from acm dev.
"Scalable crisis relief: Crowdsourced SMS translation and categorization with Mission 4636." Vaughn Hester, Aaron Shaw, Lukas Biewald http://dev2010.news.cs.nyu.edu/papers/15-hester.pdf "Evaluating and Improving the Usability of Mechanical Turk for Low-Income Workers in India." Shashank Khanna, Aishwarya Ratan, James Davis, William Thies http://dev2010.news.cs.nyu.edu/papers/12-khanna.pdf On Wed, Feb 9, 2011 at 13:48, Eleanor O'Rourke <eorourke at cs.washington.edu> wrote: > This Thursday at Change, Nathan Breit, Peter Lipay, Jennifer Apacible, and > Fransiskus Xaverius will be leading a discussion on the use of?Amazon > Mechanical Turk?for development. Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing system > which pays people small amounts of money for completing tasks that are > difficult for computer to accomplish. A person or business can post a Human > Intelligence Task (HIT), along with the fee they will pay for the task?s > completion, on the Mechanical Turk website. ?Turkers? can complete these > tasks for a few pennies a task. Examples of HITs are locating information on > a document, identifying the content of images, translating foreign > languages, transcribing speech, as well as comparing audio to written > transcripts. > > Researchers in ICTD have proposed the potential value of Mechanical Turk as > an employment opportunity for low income workers in developing countries. We > will be discussing the moral and economic implications of this type of work, > looking specifically at the business models of two crowdsourcing > NGOs?Samasource?and?CrowdFlower. > > Please join us for sandwiches, and to learn more about Mechanical Turk for > development! > > What:?Discussion on Mechanical Turk for Development > When:?Thursday, Feb 10th at noon > Where:?Paul Allen Center, Room 203
