The presentation here at Stage 3 is about crowdsourcing.

And as you might know, crowdsourcing was one of the big buzzwords of the last years, accompanied by many hopes for more democratic products and better working environments. Our speaker, Florian Alexander Schmidt, who is a researcher, journalist and designer, will give us a critical evaluation of that concept.

Please welcome him with an applause. Thank you. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. So I will speak about the good, the bad and the ugly of crowdsourcing design.

And the title is meant, can be read in two ways. So it's about the crowdsourcing of design work, but also about the way crowdsourcing platforms are designed as systems. And for full disclosure, I have a background in design, but at some point I turned more towards writing.

So in a way I switched from one precarious form of freelancing to another one. So I'm quite familiar with, let's say, free labor.

And in a sense, as a speaker here, you also work as a free laborer. You're not getting paid, but it's still something very different. And I feel the same way about writing, because you have the chance to bring your own position across and nobody tells you what to do.

And that's an important difference to crowdsourcing, which is defined by you following a brief, someone else telling you what to do. So I want to start my presentation with a short piece of concrete poetry. No worry, it's not written by me.

Unlock it, surf it, scroll it, pose it, click it, cross it, crack it, switch, update it, name it, read it, tune it, print it, scan it, send it, fax, rename it, touch it, bring it, pay it, watch it, turn it, leave it, stop, format it. Okay, as probably many of you have recognized, this is a piece by Daft Punk from 2005.

And I find it quite interesting because it's about all these tiny microtasks that we do all the time on the computer. And the idea or the rhetoric surrounding Web 2.0, you remember in the old days in 2006,

was that the new web will be about making these small contributions of the millions of people matter and to wrestle the power from the few and to have an empowerment of the user and I argue that this hope hasn't paid out

or was an illusion to some extent and maybe an illusion that I also fell for and I think the reality is more like this. So you had the old media before 2000 like TV stations and so on

and sending out their content to many recipients and then the idea of Web 2.0 was that you don't have these few senders anymore but only the community that is helping each other for nothing and crowdsourcing works exactly the opposite way.

So it's taking the contributions from the many and privatizes them again. So the direction has reversed. And in my research I look at also at older models of how computers and people connect in regards to work

and I'm quite interested in these older visions of people like J.C.R. Licklider and especially Douglas Engelbart who had a very utopian idea of how labor could be organized with the help of the computer. It was very much user-centered and it was very much about empowerment

and I think that what we experience today is quite distant from these old visions and I'm also interested in the structure of power in these systems and how they are constructed with the help of computers

and this illustration is from 1965 and it's about the introduction of punch cards in the university and you have this hierarchical structure with capitalists sitting on the top and then in the end university machines

putting out these students in form of punch cards and the slogan was Don't spindle, bend or mutilate me. And to jump forward to what's happening now this is a commercial for one of the big crowdsourcing platforms for design

and the interesting thing is that again you have very much the similar structure with all these little humancules basically in this hierarchical structure and somebody at the top sitting at the desk controlling everything but this time this is not meant as a criticism, this graphic

but as an advertisement for these platforms and so I'm quite interested in what happened between here and there essentially and the point of course is that here the advertisement says that you can be the guy on top of the pyramid letting other people work for you

and I'm also interested in how the crowd is represented and how for example are the similarities in these book cover designs where you always have these small people running around doing something but you really don't have the feeling of the empowerment of the user anymore.

Another interesting aspect about the crowd is how the term has shifted over time and so the crowd used to be something like an unruly force like the rebel in the streets as something powerful but uncontrollable and very much alike to a mob

and this notion of the crowd has changed a lot after the turn of the century basically and if you look at older scholars, classic scholars of the crowd especially like Gustave Le Bon, the guy on top in the middle they introduced the concept of crowd psychology

because the specter of democracy was haunting Europe basically so the people got more power, political power and so the question was how to control the people, how to control the crowd and it was continued by people like Sigmund Freud

and Le Bon agreed on the point that when a human joins a crowd he descends several rungs on the ladder of evolution and becomes something animal-like and primitive and definitely powerful as part of a crowd but also very destructive

and interestingly that has completely turned so the crowd now is not seen as destructive anymore but as productive and very guideable and I find that quite interesting

and also another change in the notion is that when this whole web 2.0 thing was gathering speed maybe 8 years ago there was a lot of discussions revolving around the question of quality

so the argument was that all these ex-uberant monkeys are only producing trash and we have to protect mainstream media from the cult of diameter and we have to reinstall the gatekeepers who stop people from producing all this trash

but I think that this argument is also gone so it has become clear that the crowd is very much productive indeed and can produce quality and all the trash doesn't really matter

if you can search and extract the value in what the crowd produces so what is crowdsourcing? I really like this illustration of Tom Sawyer who managed to get the crowd

or in this case his friends to do the work he was supposed to do for him for free and so crowdsourcing is a lot about this question of how you can get a job done by other people and it's a lot about making this job look very attractive

and in this Mark Twain story he managed to even get paid with sweets and stuff because he made it appear so great and so difficult and attractive to be allowed to pay in defence and crowdsourcing is really a method of production

that is perceived in two very opposing ways so there are those people who really push the concept and who think that the whole economy has to move more towards the crowdsourcing direction

because as the argument goes we as a society on a global scale deal with such great problems especially environmental issues always come up that we have to all work together and that we cannot trust the politicians and so we have to organise and all work together to create a new civilisation

and to fix a broken world so that's the rhetoric that says we can replace politics with Wikinomics in a way so that's the pro side and the opposite side surprisingly comes from Jimmy Wales for example

who says that crowdsourcing is a vile way to look at the world and it's a business model that tricks people into working for free and that might be a little bit surprising from that side but the important difference between something like Wikipedia where people also work for free

and typical crowdsourcing model is that on Wikipedia for example people help each other and what they produce is beneficial for even many more people than do the production while in crowdsourcing the results are privatised

and usually are only beneficial for those people doing the crowdsourcing process so it's an extraction of knowledge, of content, of labour basically

but this confusion about what crowdsourcing is goes back really to the guy who invented the term because he came up with two opposing definitions one he called the white paper version which I very much agree to and there are so many other definitions of crowdsourcing but I find this one quite astute

so he says it's a job that was traditionally performed by employees and that is then outsourced to the crowd basically so this notion of outsourcing is very important and his other definition that I strongly reject is that it's the application of open source principles to everything else

but as this slide showed open source works differently so it's beneficial for many people people are self-controlled, they are in the term of Christopher Kelty a recursive public in the sense that they determine the conditions under which they work

and they don't follow a brief, they don't do what someone else tells them to do to make clear that this connection to labour was right there from the beginning the term was meant to refer to that Jeff Howe who introduced the term said it's the new pool of cheap labour

everyday people using their spare cycles to create content and so on for free so one important point therefore is that crowdsourcing is about labour or crowdwork I think the term digital labour is very important

it's a term coined by Trebor Scholz and if you look for that term you find a whole different culture of discussion than if you look in the typical innovation and management literature who strangely avoids the term work or labour

it's all about how to get better ideas and how to foster innovation and so on and they never mention that it's labour essentially and I think it's important to point to the fact that it's about work and so the question that I'm interested in and that my research is basically about

is can crowdsourcing be organised in a way that is fair and sustainable for all stakeholders and it's a tricky question because there are so many different crowdsourcing platforms or projects and they are all a little bit different or quite substantially different often

and they are now like crowdsourcing.org which sees itself as like the hub for the industry they list over 2000 crowdsourcing platforms so it's very tricky to capture the problem with such a variety and what I'm trying to do is to map this field

and I'm working on this map at the moment it's not done yet but the grey areas and these arms are the crowdsourcing in like a broader definition how some people use the term and I would argue that crowdsourcing in the narrow sense is only these more red bits

and so for example data mining which is also taking something from the crowd all kinds of input doesn't require a brief so people do something anyway

and what is being swept up is basically the exhaust of what people do all the time so there's not this element of a brief and in user-generated content for example like on YouTube and so on people also don't follow a brief they create their own YouTube videos and so on and they are the directors of what they produce

it's being swept up also and nurturing the profit of Google and so on but it's still something different than crowdsourcing in the narrow sense I don't go into every aspect of that now but I want to focus on these more narrow forms of crowdsourcing and as you saw with the Tom Sawyer example

so the question is how do you get other people to do work for you and how do you get them to do your work instead of doing common space peer production things like Wikipedia for example because of course people are very happy to work for free

because it's intrinsically motivating and that's especially true for creative work people like to work on tricky problems people like to have the exposure for their creativity people like to get the experience through work so there are good reasons to work for free

but there needs to be an extra reason why you work for free for someone else and so to make it a little bit more clear I think you can first of all divide the world of crowdsourcing into unpaid and paid work and the unpaid form occurs in implicit crowdsourcing

where you do work without even really realizing it and volunteer crowd work where you donate your work because you believe in a cause even if it's for someone else and the paid part of crowdsourcing can again be subdivided in cognitive piece work or micro tasking or accordabyte in German

where you essentially get paid for every little bit you do or in contest based crowd work where you get paid in a lottery system you have to win to get paid and over all that there's a layer of gamification which gets more and more important

because it gives people incentives that are not money but where they get credit points and occur on leaderboards and get all kinds of badges and achievements instead of a payment but often these concepts are combined

so the point about gamification is that even though you are spending a lot of your time and you're putting a lot of effort in you don't have the feeling that you are losing something but you have the feeling that you are constantly making progress

that you are constantly getting better that you are rising in the hierarchy of the platform that you are working on so like real world examples are like the employee of the month but also all these like bonus points systems and so on so this is the thing that occurs now in crowdsourcing a lot

to show you the implicit crowdsourcing you all know these captures and I don't go too much into that but many of you will know that when you fill those out you're also helping Google translate stuff or recognize unreadable text or recognizing numbers of houses for Google street view and so on

so you're doing labor without really noticing it or you want to do something else but this is a side effect that you work for someone else it could also be discussed if Facebook is implicit crowd work because also there you produce something for someone else so many people count that in, I'm a little bit skeptic of that

so Nicholas Carr came up with the term sharecropping I find that quite suitable if you look at volunteer crowd work like the most famous example in Germany I guess is Gutenberg

where you had a large crowd working on discovering the plagiarism of Karl Theodor so people put in their work time because they believe in this goal of taking this guy down basically but it's still nothing where the crowd really has a use of what they produce in the sense

A very recent example is TomNord where they scan, where they outsource to the crowd the analysis of satellite images in this case to find this missing plane

and I think it's 8 million people who contributed to that and of course it's amazing that so many people are willing to invest their time for such a goal so it's not all grim but there's another site which is about the outsourcing of surveillance

which I find quite problematic so this project just stopped because it was ineffective but it was running for a few years and the idea was that you could watch the Texas border and prevent immigrants from illegally crossing the border and people were doing this from their home

you have the same thing in the UK with internet eyes where they try to crowdsource shoplifters and you could watch the surveillance cameras from small shops and what is still active is this project called Face Watch ID it's also by the British police

and you basically enter your postcode and then you can see if you might be able to recognize criminals in your neighborhood from your iPhone and so I just put this up to say that this volunteering doesn't always necessarily mean that it's good

I mean of course you can argue this is to reduce crime but still okay the paid crowd work which is the more relevant form of crowd work I think as I said falls into cognitive piece work as one category

and you might know Amazon's Mechanical Turk which is a platform where now 500 people are working on and they do these small tasks like recognizing stuff organizing databases and so on and they get like very tiny amounts

like a cent or so for everything they do and they come from 190 nations and supposedly there are 10,000 people on Amazon's Mechanical Turk at any given moment toiling away and the problematic thing or one of the problematic things about Mechanical Turk

is that these workers are quite invisible and there's a very strong information asymmetry between those giving out the work and those having to do it and so for example the people who are letting the crowd work for them they can take the work of the crowd but still say oh it was bad we don't want it

we don't pay anyone afterwards after they have taken the work which can be regarded as wage theft in a sense but the other important thing is that outside of India and the US so in the other 188 countries

that are working on Mechanical Turk Amazon is paying these workers only in vouchers so if you want to get your money from your work you have to buy your stuff in the factory shop so you're getting basically a disadvantage again

but the strange thing is that if you look into the forums of these platforms the workers even though they make as little as maybe $1.40 an hour or so if they are not experienced and this goes up to maybe like $5 or so if they are really experienced these workers don't want any regulation of their work

because they fear that the little money that they make there will break away if legislation gets in there so people in a way want to get exploited there because they are so dependent on this work because of the general economic situation

and this is clearly not crowd work that people do in their free time just for fun but people are really trying to make ends meet with this type of work and there are programs that try to build on Mechanical Turk

and use the API basically so for example this is Soylent it's a research project by the MIT where they have the idea that you have like a plug-in in your word processor where you can then just if you write a text

you can choose a paragraph and then give it to the crowd and they correct it or condense it or do different formatting with it and you pay a little bit for this service and what I find problematic about this is that the people that work for you

completely disappear in the interface so you don't have any human relationship anymore and also I mean the name is quite grim I don't know how many of you know but there's this film Soylent Green which is about an overcrowded world where at the end it becomes clear that the nutritious snack

that everybody is living on is made of people so it's quite cynical to name it this way and I think it's meant as a joke but still you have to take into consideration that this is the design of a work environment for thousands of people so they are not taking into consideration

when you design such a work environment there are projects that try to do something against this information asymmetry like for example Turcopticon which is a plug-in for Firefox

that allows the workers to see which employers tend to not pay the workers or treat them badly because Amazon does not include these informations for the worker so these systems are really designed in a way that the workers don't have any good user experience

or any control over what they are doing and this is one plug-in that tries to give more power to the workers at least in the sense of knowledge

For the rest of the talk I will speak about the crowdsourcing of design because this is what I'm especially interested in and an interesting aspect about this is that Joachim Benkler, the guy who came up with the term Common Space Peer Production pointed out that if the granularity of the task is very high

so if the individual tasks are very small like on Mechanical Turk or on all kinds of other platforms the incentive becomes trivial so if the task is very tiny and you do it on the side a little bit then you don't expect much to earn from that

but with design solutions you cannot do that you cannot fine-grain it to the extent that you for example can do data input so you have to work a few hours to create a design and so you cannot pay the workers for every click they do

that's why you need the contest system and I will let one of those big platforms in the field 99designs who have about 300,000 registered designers working for them explain their business model to you

Welcome to 99designs, the number one marketplace for crowd-sourced creative design What makes 99designs different? With 99designs you get dozens of designers to work on your project We help you host a design contest where a crowd of designers compete to give you the design you love or your money back

Here's how it works Tell us what you need Logo, business cards, website or even product packaging Then tell us how much you'd like to pay That's right, you decide how much you pay The more you offer, the more design concepts you'll see Within hours, designs begin to pour in

After that, tell everybody what you like and what you don't like so the designers can improve their designs After seven days, you'll have pages of designs from dozens of designers Then comes the really fun part Check out all the designs until you find the perfect match Rest assured, if you don't get a design you love, we'll give you your money back

99designs is simply the best way to get graphic design done affordably and with no risk Already over 50,000 projects have passed through our doors Now it's your turn Launch your design project today So, 99designs and similar platforms, they are growing like Topsy

A few years ago there was a lot of protests in the design community against these and attempts to say don't work there and so on and maybe people thought that it might go away again but I think this is not going to happen

So, 99designs for example acquired I think 35 million dollar venture capital which is quite substantial The point is why it's so attractive for venture capital is because they found a way that they can not only outsource completely the labor

without having to pay for it but also completely the risk So they are only controlling the platform, the stack so to speak without doing much and they take about 40% of the money that the clients pay

So if you go there to get a logo done and you pay 400 euro 99designs takes off 120 euro right away and then there's 180 euro left for all the designers to compete and there are about 116 logos that you get for that on average So the price of a logo falls down to I think 1 dollar 50 or so

and the chance for you to get paid for your work is then 1 in 116 or something like that So it's very risky for you to work in this environment You have two choices basically Either you self-exploit yourself a lot and put in a lot of time to get good logos

or you steal ideas which many people do in these environments So it's a lot about recycling stuff from some kind of databases, from clip art and so on which has the effect that on top of the very problematic working conditions money-wise

people are also inclined to rat each other out and saying Oh user this and this stole this idea from there and so they're posting links where the ideas came from So you have those people trying to game the system by uploading half ready-made designs and those who put in far too much time

especially because they have portfolio sites on these platforms where all the design that you do there basically falls back on you So you want to have a good logo in your portfolio even if you get not paid for it at all So that's the reason why in design work people are really inclined to do work

that is really, they put in much more time than would be economically reasonable Design lessons is another platform, a German platform I just included this to show you the ratio in which the most successful people win contests

So the most successful person on that platform you see has won about 500 contests but he participated in 3,000 So that's the most successful guy there So every fifth time only he gets paid for his work You see the most successful people sorted after the success rate

The more you take part in a way the more realistic it becomes that you lose So it's like gambling that if you do it sometimes you might have luck but if you do it a lot chances are or odds are against you

I included this testimony because it brings across a few points It's by a designer from the Philippines and she writes about the spec addiction and how addictive it is that you always think you almost won and then the client says oh can you change please this and that

and you do more work and more work and then again you still don't win And so you earn that little money that even for people in the Philippines it can be quite tough even though they have of course much lower living standards or costs than we have So globalization is a very important aspect of crowdsourcing

And here you cannot seriously compete with people with that less living costs but even for them it's difficult So the big question is, is it exploitation and how to define exploitation?

And of course there's this whole Marxist body of theory that argues that basically if a value is extracted that does not flow back to the workers if they work longer than they are getting paid for it's already exploitation but that makes basically every job exploitation in capitalism

So I really can recommend to read the paper of this professor of philosophy who argues that it's really about having a fair share in the value that is being extracted and we could go back to that in the discussion later I will now show a few design, crowd design platforms that are working different

They are not so outright exploitative but try to make things differently So Lego Ideas for example gives those who contribute ideas and who make it through a long process

a one year long process of gathering contributors for their designs They get a share in the revenue that Lego eventually makes in this process which of course sounds great Here it's the problem like on a hit list or so

that in effect all the products that are effectively get made in the end are already existing brands So because for Lego that promises the biggest profit I guess and also you can get the most supporters for your idea So there are more original ideas like including more female scientists for Lego

or playful ideas but the things that actually make it to the shelves are usually parts of already existing brands like Back to the Future and Harry Potter and so on and so forth And they produce I think two or three new products every year

So you have to do a lot of work in gathering ten thousand supporters before your product has even a chance that they look at it to produce it The most successful company at the moment in this field is Quirky

and they are quite amazing They now have eight hundred thousand designers working for them and they develop these products like household products usually rather simple but clever ideas for all kinds of stuff and they also have this evaluation process with the crowd

so it's the crowd who pushes things forward and they collaborate on these ideas and the platform tracks who has contributed what to a very fine grained extent and so if the product makes it to the shelves and in contrast to Lego they put out three new products every week that then land in thirty five thousand stores

with a very high production rate they make a lot of money actually and they have this weekly evaluation processes where the hundred and fifty employees of the company vote together with the community

which projects are going to move forward and Quirky actually is putting a lot of work in there so the community contributes the ideas and refines them but Quirky makes real products out of them they have a lot of product designers working for them they have the whole infrastructure from production to the shelves and so they can be very very profitable

and can pay a lot back to the crowd a while ago I made an interview with this guy who developed this special wine opener and he now earned thirty three thousand dollars through the sales and through getting part of the revenues

and so that's already quite substantial and his name and his pictures on the packaging of the product together with the names of hundreds of other people I think maybe eight hundred or so who have also influenced this idea

and also get like a tiny fraction of the revenue and Quirky, this is the most successful guy on Quirky he already earned six hundred thousand dollars for a very clever I don't know what the English word is

so they make a lot of money and also again venture capital is pouring in so they now got a hundred and seventy six million in venture capital that Quirky acquired and they make eighteen million in revenue in 2012 and they are still growing very quickly

but they are also still not profitable because they are expanding so much another example is Yovoto, it's a Berlin startup and they work differently because they do campaigns and designs for big brands and they have large sums of money that the crowd can win in a contest

and the crowd also is taking part in the evaluation so it's not a winner-takes-it-all model but there are maybe five winners who take sums from like ten thousand euro to maybe five or two thousand

so depending on if you are the first or the third and the intellectual property rights if the company actually tries to produce something or wants to produce something you get paid for that extra and in contrast to the logo design you don't produce the full product

you produce the idea so there is a big difference so they really try to organize it as fair as possible so you see how the pricing is organized plus a licensing fee so I think they do a lot of things right

and they are very aware of the exploitation of fairness problem in crowdsourcing last platform that I want to briefly mention is OpenIDEO it's by the big IDEO design corporation

but they try to circumvent the problem of fairness by only outsourcing projects to the crowd that are meant to be for the greater good and they don't pay the crowd at all and they want you to participate because of experience

and because it's socially beneficial and as you see for example this design quotient is a good example for the implementation of gamification so if I work there for every little bit I do I get points and this is how people on the platform perceive me

so I wear this badge in front of me and of course it's a huge incentive for me to put in extra hour and to rate the designs of the other people and to generally be a nice person because this is the currency on the platform this design quotient

enough examples back to the question from the beginning so can crowddesign or crowdsourcing be designed in a way that is fair and sustainable for all stakeholders and well I think not both I think that examples like Yovoto show that it can be designed fair in a way

that the revenues are more fairly distributed and so on but still it's not a sustainable model I just came from a talk about freelancing and there was the same argument there that you cannot work for free if it's your profession

and it's something like an internship that might make sense in the beginning of your career when you have no experience and so on and even then it's problematic but there might be good reasons why you decide to work for free but as a profession it's really detrimental and problematic I think

so it can be organized the platforms can be designed in a way that is more fair but you always have to take into consideration that there's always a limited budget for the work but if the crowd by definition is unlimitedly large you always have to separate this budget either everyone gets very tiny amount of money

or it's a winner-takes-it-all model and so that cannot be sustainable if you work for free and the people around Yovoto, Bastian Unterberg and two other guys they wrote quite a good, insightful book about crowdsourcing they call it Crowdstorming

where you can really see that they are aware of the fairness and so the book is pretty good but what is really disturbing is that they keep referring to American Idol which is like the American version of Deutschland Süchten Superstar or rather the other way around but I think it's horrible to have a working situation

where you have this system of everybody competing against everybody and there's only one winner in the end where there are these production companies in the background that continuously make a lot of money and all this venture capital that is flowing into the area of crowd work

shows that people really believe in those people who give the money that they can extract substantially more money out of it over time so it really shows that the system is flawed I think

and to come back to a picture from the beginning there's this moral philosopher called John Rawls and he has this concept of a theory of justice basically to evaluate fairness and his idea is that if you design a system

those who design it should be in the position or put them in the mental position of not knowing in which position they will later take in the system only then it's fair so if you upfront have a veil of ignorance

so you don't know where you land in this system and you certainly don't want to land here but if you don't have a chance when you land there to move up it's basically an unfair system so I think this is an important point

where do you put yourself? Do you see yourself in this position of now being able to outsource work yourself to become an exploiter in a way and then send stuff to developing countries and be in this powerful position or do you see the whole system and also the other side?

I mentioned already the point of sustainability and I don't know how many of you yesterday saw the very good talk by Saskia Sassen and she also talked about the erosion of the middle class and the way capital extracts resources from a broader and broader part of society

and I think this is part of what we are also seeing with crowdsourcing and there's a very good book by Jaron Lanier it's called Who Owns the Future? and he also addresses this problem and he says that it's basically what he calls the siren service

those people who own the structure, who own the stack, who own the platform who basically get more and more powerful you see it with Google and Facebook and so on while you have the majority of people who are basically treated as livestock in there

so they are disposable and his conclusion which is maybe worth discussing is that we should not work for free at all we should implement a system where everything we do gets paid a tiny amount and so it piles up so the flaw in his system is that this demands that we have like a total surveillance

that everything we do on the internet is being recorded and then there's like a mechanism where profits are distributed according to this total surveillance in a way as you have it as a model on Quirky

where also the platform tracks every little contribution that you make the other model that you come across especially in Germany a lot is the idea of a bedingungslose Grundeincom like a general basic income which also sounds tempting because then if you are paid

you can spend your time as you will on these free labor projects and experience your creativity and enhance your mastership and so on I think the flaw in that proposition is that then you really have to even have more strict border control for example

so you cannot have people like you cannot have 7 billion people moving freely around the world when you have a system that is based on the state paying people to have a decent living and not paying them for their work

that's why I'm a little bit skeptical of the Grundeincom I have to wrap up now so maybe one idea would be to tax companies that draw so much from the general public very high amounts of money and use that money to redistribute

but I also don't think that that's the final solution or the perfect idea so I don't have a solution to the problem my mission is more to point out that crowdsourcing is indeed very problematic and that it's not like a fledgling new web phenomenon anymore but that it has consolidated and is now like a huge industry

and that we should be aware of the exploitation mechanisms in this industry and if you see the whole thing from the aspect of workplace design this is really like a neo-liberal ideal come true

to work in an environment where you have total surveillance you are paid by gamification everything you do is tracked and I find it quite dystopian and so I think it's important to stand up against it

so thank you yes, thank you very much for that very insightful presentation we have ten more minutes for questions to you are there any questions in the audience?

thank you very much for your great presentation I have a question about the because you mentioned the Open IDEO platform and what I find interesting about this platform is

this is about non-profit projects but if you want to apply for a job at IDEO they expect you to have an Open IDEO profile so I wonder what you think about the fact regardless of how these crowdsourcing platforms are designed especially at the beginning of your career you need to be participating and you need an online portfolio

for which you are not being paid in order to be visible or apply to jobs it's super interesting that you mention it can I ask you back, how do you know that? because I keep hearing that and I think it makes totally sense that it's basically like an externalized internship system but it's hard to prove that have you made this experience?

I'm a researcher, I'm not a designer so I was thinking about applying to design research jobs but I don't have a design portfolio and then I thought, I haven't applied because I didn't want to spend months building up a profile on this platform for free but I think this is really the main motivating factor behind it

but it's hard to track that down but the time, it's super time consuming in contrast to other crowd projects because the projects are so complex you really have to read a lot of what other people contributed and it's very intensive labor actually to be able to keep up with that Are there some more questions?

Hi, if I understood it correctly you say that it should be a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives that you offer on your platform I'm a bit skeptical about the intrinsic ones I have to say because badges are nice and I personally like it

I go for gamification like that but how would you say you could structure these intrinsic incentives so that it's fun and people go for it and you feel like you can do something because you showed the design quotient which you can wear as a badge of honor and you can put it in your CV maybe or something like that

What's your idea of making that good? I think that the intrinsic motivation is really what you bring yourself so I think it's hard to design that and I think that gamification for me is really an extrinsic mechanism but you point to a very important thing

the fact that you cannot extract your experience from these platforms and take them anywhere else so you basically tie to this thing and if you show up with your design quotient by another company who might not know that platform you start from nothing you cannot really put that in your CV that you worked there for free that many times

so there's a lock-in effect with the reputation that you build up in these platforms So you think it should be in a way where you could do that that would be a good thing that you make it something more general so you can take it and put it in your CV and have it as a reference That would be a step forward

but I think you should get properly paid and put that in your bank account and take that with you Thanks I see a question over there

You hinted a bit at the problems with crowdsourcing policing or border control Could you say a bit more about that and where you think the line is with community sharing information? I think that it's problematic when you outsource

obligations that clearly belong to the state to the crowd, to save money So you don't know what the motivation of people is who participate in these surveillance projects Even with the Gutenberg thing, the Gutenberg

I mean the motivation of the people of course someone to defend academia and it serves a function but there's of course also always like a political agenda and you don't know why people are so keen on bringing that particular person down and you also don't know if they got hinted off

by someone else following a political agenda and so on So I think there are many parts of work that should clearly not be outsourced in a way where you don't have any control who is participating for what reason and another example is

Al Gore is doing this project that is called Reality Drop where he basically crowdsourced a fight against climate change deniers where you have like a gamified platform where people get credit points when they place arguments again

that show climate change is actually happening into other websites and discussion forums and so on So you might see a comment in a platform that seems reasonable and you are not even aware that this person is not posting this comment necessarily because he or she read the discussion

but he or she gets credit points on some other platform So it becomes very in-transparent what people are motivated by and who guides them through gamification for example and also with the state thing I think you should not pay like headhunting fees or gamified bonus point systems

for tracking down criminals It's like the Wild Wild West So into the wild is really like the motto also for that So are there any questions? Any hands? Over there

Hi, thank you for a very interesting presentation Quick question, so in crowdfunding you have some interesting examples of

the crowd buying equities and products and get revenue sharing Do you know of licenses that are kind of designed to the same for where people contribute their skills or insights rather than money into creating a product So kind of licenses for revenue sharing You have it in Lego and you have it in Quirky

So these are two of the big examples where you really have part of the revenue and I think that's quite fair because the more profit somebody makes with your idea the more money you also get Great, I have loads of questions but I'll catch you later Okay, yeah, do that

Alright, we have time for one or two more questions Oh, over there There is one more issue about crowd sourcing

If crowd is solving some really difficult problems there is some intellectual property, IP of the companies and NDA and it's rather complicated Companies don't want to give their secrets out but they want to get problems solved which are connected with these secrets

How do you think this will work? Well, there's a platform for example a very old platform already like 12 years old, InnoCentive That is where people solve research and development problems for big chemical corporations for example and there it works the way that at least the crowd cannot see

the contributions of the others So it's not visible what the others do and so you have some protection that your idea is not going away But for people, like for inventors for example the inventor that I interviewed from Quirky did this wine opening thing He said that if he has like a really

good idea. He first goes to platforms where nobody can seize his idea and then when the companies reject his idea, then he goes to community platforms where the risk that somebody steals his idea is higher, but also the chance that it's being developed. So he had like the system of going from one platform to the other depending on the

level of secrecy. Okay, I fear our time is running up. Thank you again for this wonderful presentation. I think you will be available for answers after the talk. There will be another crowdsourcing talk in two hours. Exactly, I'll moderate that. We'll have a short break and continue with the next presentation.

Thank you.