Micro jobs

Not as directly visible is the online advancing phenomenon of crowdsourced labour. This concept denotes tasks that are divided into many micro-tasks that people can perform online all over the world. These are thus vacant micro-tasks (‘V’) that are traded on an online marketplace (e.g. data entry, overwriting handwritten documents, organizing photos by colour). For piecework, people who do a lot of micro-tasks can still earn money. In the freelance IT market you see micro tasking on more highly qualified work.

Example

An interesting website is Microtask.com. They became known when they devised a game for the Finnish National Archives (Mole Bridge) with which – while playing – handwritten words from archival documents were typed in by its players. As such, the archive was digitized by (in this case) playing volunteers. Amazon’s Mechanical Turkis is one of the largest micro task websites: they apply their knowledge of a book site to the online job market. The Dutch Mobbr developed a kind of PayPal system for the online payment of microsalaries.