Opportunopoly

Online media opportunities abound if publishers are but willing to look beyond their traditional definitions. Opportunopoly examines emerging technology and market game-changers, thought leaders and, well, opportunities that may lie beyond the usual newspaper comfort zone.

This topic is technical enough and touchy enough to get me in over my head quickly, so I'll need a tad more of your indulgence for this muse. Think conceptually, not, er, mechanically about this one. 

Amazon's Mechanical Turk was created to establish a platform for the exchange of services between providers and requesters that accommodated micro-payments. Perhaps it's the "micro" piece of this equation that led to many programmers (the most likely fodder of a work-for-hire online exchange) to see this "on-demand workforce" application as intrinsically exploitative. Why pay an American developer $180/hour if you can get one in India for $5? (And now I can hear all you publishers out there saying, "What's wrong with that!" Read on, this isn't necessarily an indictment of outsourcing...)

It could be the anonymity implied in the term "HIT" or "Human Intelligence Task" that is the focus of this bad rap. Judging from the jobs posted, i.e. sending unwanted emails for 10 cents a pop, it certainly has facilitated some "quick hits." For background, the name Mechanical Turk derives from a "machine" circa 1770 that purported to play chess like a person. As should be obvious from the date, of course there WAS a person inside the machine playing the game, so Amazon's unfortunate name for the service may have led to its become a magnet for spamming and potential fraud.

At least one thoughtful blogger raises the question of whether the very issue of payment detracts from what could have been a really great idea. Or, could it be just the closed (single buyer) end-to-end system and often trivial context of these tasks that are at fault for creating this impression? By definition, what's exchanged is a service that is something only a human can do. Coding is just one subset of human work which has the ability to be re-shared. Could editorial fit the bill here too? Blogs? Design/original artwork?

Putting the kybosh on reuse, Amazon's Turk agreement specifies that the requester/employer is the one who owns the work contracted as a "work for hire." But what if there were two tiers of service, one in which the work, if properly indexed, could be re-sold and so earn the provider additional income with no additional effort and without compromising the original requestor's purpose? Seems like a logical extension of the network effect. Applying Amazon's ratings system could even draw attention to works of higher quality. 

In the context of programming, this starts to sound like a code bank. So you know, I first proposed the notion of an online newspaper industry code repository back in 1996 or 1997, and it's an idea that has gnawed on me sinc. There are much better, open-source efforts available today, of course, like jquery.com, a Javascript library that makes use of a general public license allowing the programmer to download, change, and even sell the result of his or her collaboration. (To be fair, even Amazon's "Turk" has one -- it's just Amazon API-centric. Want a free online "store"? It only works on Amazon, but it's a start...)

While code swapping is done well online, this hasn't extended to other works and services for hire. Yet what distinguishes such repositories seems to be exactly what's missing from both the Mechanical Turk and our own industry when it comes to the efforts of the job seeker: we have no good way of properly cataloging either the fallow talents of "producers" or the "products" of their labors which might be put to good use elsewhere.

Now I hear the recently RIFed project and business developers and content professionals in my head agonizing about what sort of collective could be constructed to exploit them. All I can point to is fact: at this moment there's more high quality, newspaper-centric, new media talent out there on the street through buy-outs, RIFs and "generalized cuts" than ever before. What if all their talents could be combined into a sort of "reverse Turk" -- one that emphasized the provider of services over the hirer? This starts to suggest a talent agency where work for hire begins to match its real-world worth, even as adjusted for economic downturn. The reasons even information markets still function so inefficiently is in part because people in need of services just don't know their needs could be met efficiently by virtual labor. That, and the workforce engines we have built aren't focused on the "work," or even the "worker" at all. 

The existing job boards the industry has created with their "resume searching" just don't cut it. If I had a buck for every "insurance executive" solicitation I've received through CareerBuilder... The bottom line is that nothing we've built as an industry allows for the free-exchange of human-intelligent goods and services or original works, because everything we've done to date focuses on the employer, not the employee. They miss what could be a massive opportunity just by assuming that the end result is more or less a full-time job, and not the work product that's desired. That output could be a marketing plan, a Website design or coding for a specific application. Cataloging the end product or producer is the only way to make such an exchange viable. The only one I've seen for editorial that seems to get results is MediaBistro's Freelance Marketplace, but it's just an index and showcase, not an exchange. 

Google built a print ad exchange with the help of publishers, but this system works largely because it was built with the advertiser in mind. I'm just asking -- what if our "job boards" paid a little more attention to the works and the work potential represented by job seekers? Someone will. And with the high price of gas and the computer literacy and ingenuity being asked for from today's unemployed, it will be a very serious business.  

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