Lecture 4 - Tue Sept 9 (15-17) Silberman

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Time & Place: Tue September 9 at 15-17 in lecture hall V3

Guest lecturer: Six Silberman, Co-maintainer, Turkopticon; PhD student, Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine

Title: Crowd work and the 'sharing economy': a non-exuberant introduction to the commons

Talk: 
Crowd work
+ What is crowd work?
+ What are some different models of crowd work?
+ What is Mechanical Turk?
+ Who works on Mechanical Turk and why?
+ What is Turkopticon and why does it exist?
+ What is at stake in serious discussions of the 'future of crowd work'?

'Sharing' economy
+ What is the 'sharing' economy?
+ What do people like about it?
+ Who does the work in the 'sharing' economy?
+ What are some of the obvious difficulties (e.g., threatening livelihoods and quality of service in existing regulated industries)?
+ What are some of the more subtle critiques (e.g., increasing precarity)?
+ What might a 'real' sharing economy look like?

About: With co-founder Lilly Irani, moderators Taintturk, Anne M, rubyr, and Tribune, and the crowd worker community, Six helps maintain Turkopticon, a web service for workers on Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. With Bill Tomlinson, Bonnie Nardi, Lisa Nathan, Maria Håkansson, Eric Baumer, Daniel Pargman, and other collaborators, he also works to contribute to actionable understandings of "sustainability" and "unsustainability" among human-computer interaction researchers.

Literature: "Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork" (Silberman, Irani, and Ross, 2010) gives a brief introduction to Mechanical Turk and the challenges workers face. And it's short, written for a general audience, and it has pictures. Also please have a look at this paper (which Peter Jakobsson also recommended for his lecture):
- Irani, L. (2013). The cultural work of microwork. New Media & Society, 1461444813511926 (Published online but not yet in print).

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