Crowdsourcing Design: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
Schmidt, Florian Alexander
This talk looks at the ethics and aesthetics of the crowdsourcing industry, its dark side and silver linings, with a focus on the crowdsourcing of design. What distinguishes the crowd design from micro tasking? And is crowdsourcing inherently exploitative or can it be done in a way that is sustainable for all stakeholders?
 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 in a, 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 this is, as a speaker here you also work as a free laborer. Maybe 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. Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, melt, upgrade it, charge it, point it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it, quick erase it, write it, get it, paste it, save it, load it, check it, quick rewrite it, plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag it, drop it, zip and zip it, lock it, fill it, call it, find it, view it, code it, jump and lock it, surf it, scroll it, pose it, click it, cross it, crack it, switch updated, name it, read it, tune it, print it, scan it, send it, tax 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 micro tasks 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. 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, 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 JCR 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 without 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, the 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 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 humancule, 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, 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 spectrum 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 Zygmunt 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 the 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 eight years ago, there was a lot of discussions revolving around the question of quality. So the argument was that all these exuberant 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 suites and stuff because he made it appear so great and so difficult and attractive to be allowed to paint the fence. 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 organize and all work together to create a new civilization and to fix a broken world. So that's the rhetoric and that says we can replace politics with Wikimics 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 privatized and usually are only beneficial for those people doing the crowdsourcing process so it's an extraction of knowledge of content of labor 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. 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 there in the term of Christopher Calty 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 labor was right there from the beginning. The term was meant to refer to that is that Jeff Howell who introduced the term said it's the new pool of cheap labor. Everyday people using their spare cycles to create content and so on for free. So one important point therefore is that crowdsourcing is about labor or crowd work. I think the term digital labor is very important. It's a term coined by Trebor Schultz. 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 labor. It's all about how to get better ideas and how to foster innovation and so on. And they never mentioned that it's labor 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 organized 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 2,000 crowdsourcing platforms. So it's very tricky to capture the problem with such a variety. But 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 gray 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 many reasons, 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. 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 piecework or microtasking or accord-arbitre 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 time and you're putting a lot in 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're constantly getting better, that you are rising in the hierarchy of the platform that you are working on. So real-world examples are the employee of the month but also all these bonus point 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 but so many people count that in. I'm a little bit sceptic of that. So Nicolas Carr came up with the term sharecropping. I find that quite suitable. If you look at volunteer crowd work, the most famous example in Germany I guess is Gutmann Pluck where you had a large crowd working on discovering the plagiarism of Karl Theodor and so people put in their work time because they believe in the goal of taking this guy down basically. But it's still something where the crowd really has a use of what they produce in the sense. Very recent example is Tomnert 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 eight 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 tried to crowdsource shop lifters and you could watch the surveillance cameras from small shops. And what is still active is this project, it's called FaceWatch ID. It's also by the British police and it's about you basically enter your postcode and then you can see if you might be able to recognize criminals in your neighborhood from your iPhone. 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 the 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 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, a symmetry between those giving out the work and those having to do it. And so for example the people who 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 $5.00 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 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 TerCopticon 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 information 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 Jochai Benkler, the guy who came up with the term common space 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 you don't, 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, 99 Designs, who have about 300,000 registered designers working for them, explain their business model to you. Welcome to 99 Designs, the number one marketplace for crowdsourced creative design. What makes 99 Designs different? With 99 Designs, 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. 99 Designs 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 99 Designs and similar platforms, they are growing like topsy. A few years ago, there was a lot of protest 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. I think this is not going to happen. So 99 Designs, for example, acquired I think $35 million 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 stacks so to speak, without doing much. 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, 99 Designs 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 $1.50 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 and you have two choices basically. You yourself 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 read 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. And so that's a 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 lesson is another platform in 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 3000 and so that's the most successful guy there and so in every fifth time only he gets paid for his work. And if you see the most successful people sorted after the success rate like 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 like 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 and 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. And 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 10,000 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 Querky and they are quite amazing. They now have 800,000 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 35,000 stores with a very high production rate. They make a lot of money actually and they have this weekly evaluation process where the 150 employees of the company vote together with the community which projects are going to move forward. And Querky actually is putting a lot of work in there so the community contributes the ideas and refines them but Querky 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 $33,000 through the sales and through being 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 800 or so who have also influenced this idea and also get like a tiny fraction of the revenue. And Querky, this is the most successful guy on Querky, he already earned $600,000 for a very clever steck doser. 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 $176 million in venture capital that Querky acquired and they make $18 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 Jovoto, 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 and so it's not a winner takes it all model but there may be five winners who take sums from like 10,000 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 goes forward with it is you get paid for that extra and in contrast to the design logos, the logo design you don't produce the full product, you produce the idea and so there is a big difference. So, they really try to organize it as fair as possible and so you see how the pricing is organized and plus a licensing fee and so I think they do a lot of things right and they are very aware of the exploitation of fairness problem in crowdsourcing. That 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. Okay enough examples, back to the question from the beginning. So can crowd design 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 your Voto 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 your Voto, Bastia Nunterberg and two other guys, they wrote quite a good inside book about crowd sourcing, 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 such den Superstar or rather the other way around but I think it's horrible to have like a working situation where you have this system of everybody competing to everybody 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 is this moral philosopher called John Rolz 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 up front have like 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 to when you land there to move up or if you it's basically an unfair system and so I think this is an important point of how 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 send stuff to developing countries and be in this powerful position or do you see the whole system and also the other side. And 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 Geron Lanie 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 with Facebook and so on, where you have like 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 and we should implement a system where everything we do gets paid a tiny amount and so it piles up. 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 bedingungsloser Grundeinkommen, like a general basic income which also sounds tempting because then I mean 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 Grundeinkommen. 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 like the final solution or the perfect idea or so. 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 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 neoliberal 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. So I think it's important to stand up against that. So thank you. Yes, thank you very much for the 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 OpenIDO 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 OpenIDO 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're not being paid in order to be visible or apply to jobs. It's super interesting that you mentioned it. Can I ask you back, how do you know that? Because I keep hearing that and I think it makes total sense that it's basically like an externalized internship system but it's hard to prove that. Have you made this experience or? 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. Yeah, 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. 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? Well, I think that the intrinsic motivation that 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 work 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. So I see a question over there. Thanks. Hi. 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? Well, I think that it's problematic when you outsource obligations that clearly belong to the state, to the crowd, to save money. Because you also don't know what the motivation of people is who participate in these surveillance projects. Even with the Gutenberg thing, the Gutenplug. 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 El Gore is doing this project that is called Reality Drop where he basically crowdsourced a fight against climate change deniers where you have 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 transparent what people are motivated by and who guides them through gamification for example. And also like with the state thing I think you should not pay like head hunting fees or gamified bonus point systems for tracking down criminals. It's like the wild, wild west so into the wild it's 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 very new 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 I think 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, do that. All right, we have time for one or two more questions. Oh, over there. There is one more issue about crowd sourcing. If a 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 is a platform for example, a very old platform already like 12 years old, Innocentif that is where people solve research and development problems for big chemical corporations for example. 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 who did this wine opening thing, he said that if he has like a really good idea he first goes to platforms where nobody can see his idea and then if they, 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 them with the next presentation. Thank you.
 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 in a, 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 this is, as a speaker here you also work as a free laborer.  Maybe 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.  Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, melt, upgrade it, charge it, point  it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it, quick erase it, write it, get it, paste it, save  it, load it, check it, quick rewrite it, plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag it,  drop it, zip and zip it, lock it, fill it, call it, find it, view it, code it, jump and  lock it, surf it, scroll it, pose it, click it, cross it, crack it, switch updated, name  it, read it, tune it, print it, scan it, send it, tax 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 micro tasks 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.  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, 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 JCR 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  without 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, the 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 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 humancule, 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,  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 spectrum 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 Zygmunt 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 the 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 eight years ago, there was a lot of discussions revolving around the question  of quality.  So the argument was that all these exuberant 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 suites and stuff because  he made it appear so great and so difficult and attractive to be allowed to paint the  fence.  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 organize and all work together to create a new civilization and to fix a  broken world.  So that's the rhetoric and that says we can replace politics with Wikimics 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 privatized and usually are only beneficial for those  people doing the crowdsourcing process so it's an extraction of knowledge of content  of labor 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.  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 there in the term of Christopher Calty 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 labor was right there from the beginning.  The term was meant to refer to that is that Jeff Howell who introduced the term said it's  the new pool of cheap labor.  Everyday people using their spare cycles to create content and so on for free.  So one important point therefore is that crowdsourcing is about labor or crowd work.  I think the term digital labor is very important.  It's a term coined by Trebor Schultz.  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 labor.  It's all about how to get better ideas and how to foster innovation and so on.  And they never mentioned that it's labor 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 organized 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 2,000 crowdsourcing platforms.  So it's very tricky to capture the problem with such a variety.  But 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 gray 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 many reasons, 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.  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 piecework or microtasking  or accord-arbitre 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 time and  you're putting a lot in 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're constantly getting  better, that you are rising in the hierarchy of the platform that you are working on.  So real-world examples are the employee of the month but also all these bonus point 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 but so many people count that in.  I'm a little bit sceptic of that.  So Nicolas Carr came up with the term sharecropping.  I find that quite suitable.  If you look at volunteer crowd work, the most famous example in Germany I guess is Gutmann  Pluck where you had a large crowd working on discovering the plagiarism of Karl Theodor  and so people put in their work time because they believe in the goal of taking this guy  down basically.  But it's still something where the crowd really has a use of what they produce in the sense.  Very recent example is Tomnert 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  eight 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 tried to crowdsource shop  lifters and you could watch the surveillance cameras from small shops.  And what is still active is this project, it's called FaceWatch ID.  It's also by the British police and it's about you basically enter your postcode and then  you can see if you might be able to recognize criminals in your neighborhood from your iPhone.  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 the 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 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, a symmetry between  those giving out the work and those having to do it.  And so for example the people who 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 $5.00 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  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 TerCopticon 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 information 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 Jochai Benkler, the guy who came up with the  term common space 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 you don't, 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, 99 Designs, who have about 300,000  registered designers working for them, explain their business model to you.  Welcome to 99 Designs, the number one marketplace for crowdsourced creative design.  What makes 99 Designs different?  With 99 Designs, 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.  99 Designs 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 99 Designs and similar platforms, they are growing like topsy.  A few years ago, there was a lot of protest 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.  I think this is not going to happen.  So 99 Designs, for example, acquired I think $35 million 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 stacks so to speak, without doing much.  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, 99 Designs 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 $1.50 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 and you have two choices basically.  You yourself 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 read 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.  And so that's a 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 lesson is another platform in 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 3000 and so that's the most successful guy there and so in every fifth  time only he gets paid for his work.  And if you see the most successful people sorted after the success rate like 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 like 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 and 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.  And 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 10,000 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 Querky and they are quite  amazing.  They now have 800,000 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 35,000 stores with a very high production rate.  They make a lot of money actually and they have this weekly evaluation process where  the 150 employees of the company vote together with the community which projects are going  to move forward.  And Querky actually is putting a lot of work in there so the community contributes the  ideas and refines them but Querky 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 $33,000 through the sales and through being 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 800 or so who have also influenced this idea and  also get like a tiny fraction of the revenue.  And Querky, this is the most successful guy on Querky, he already earned $600,000 for  a very clever steck doser.  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 $176 million in venture capital that Querky acquired and they make $18 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 Jovoto, 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 and so it's not a winner takes it all model  but there may be five winners who take sums from like 10,000 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 goes  forward with it is you get paid for that extra and in contrast to the design logos, the logo  design you don't produce the full product, you produce the idea and so there is a big  difference.  So, they really try to organize it as fair as possible and so you see how the pricing  is organized and plus a licensing fee and so I think they do a lot of things right and  they are very aware of the exploitation of fairness problem in crowdsourcing.  That 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.  Okay enough examples, back to the question from the beginning.  So can crowd design 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 your Voto 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 your Voto, Bastia Nunterberg and two other guys, they wrote quite a good  inside book about crowd sourcing, 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 such den Superstar or rather the other way around but I think it's  horrible to have like a working situation where you have this system of everybody competing  to everybody 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 is this moral philosopher called John  Rolz 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 up front have like 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 to when you  land there to move up or if you it's basically an unfair system and so I think this is an  important point of how 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 send stuff to developing  countries and be in this powerful position or do you see the whole system and also the  other side.  And 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 Geron Lanie 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 with Facebook and so on, where you have like 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  and we should implement a system where everything we do gets paid a tiny amount and so it piles  up.  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 bedingungsloser  Grundeinkommen, like a general basic income which also sounds tempting because then I  mean 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 Grundeinkommen.  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 like the final solution or the perfect idea or so.  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 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  neoliberal 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.  So I think it's important to stand up against that.  So thank you.  Yes, thank you very much for the 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 OpenIDO 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 OpenIDO 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're not being paid in order to be visible  or apply to jobs.  It's super interesting that you mentioned it.  Can I ask you back, how do you know that?  Because I keep hearing that and I think it makes total sense that it's basically like  an externalized internship system but it's hard to prove that.  Have you made this experience or?  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.  Yeah, 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.  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?  Well, I think that the intrinsic motivation that 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 work 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.  So I see a question over there.  Thanks.  Hi.  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?  Well, I think that it's problematic when you outsource obligations that clearly belong  to the state, to the crowd, to save money.  Because you also don't know what the motivation of people is who participate in these surveillance  projects.  Even with the Gutenberg thing, the Gutenplug.  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 El Gore is doing this project that is called Reality Drop where  he basically crowdsourced a fight against climate change deniers where you have 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 transparent what people are motivated by and who guides them through  gamification for example.  And also like with the state thing I think you should not pay like head hunting fees  or gamified bonus point systems for tracking down criminals.  It's like the wild, wild west so into the wild it's 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 very new 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 I think 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, do that.  All right, we have time for one or two more questions.  Oh, over there.  There is one more issue about crowd sourcing.  If a 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 is a platform for example, a very old platform already like 12 years old, Innocentif  that is where people solve research and development problems for big chemical corporations for  example.  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  who did this wine opening thing, he said that if he has like a really good idea he  first goes to platforms where nobody can see his idea and then if they, 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 them with the next presentation.  Thank you.
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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 in a, 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 this is, as a speaker here you also work as a free laborer. Maybe 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. Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, melt, upgrade it, charge it, point it, zoom it, press it, snap it, work it, quick erase it, write it, get it, paste it, save it, load it, check it, quick rewrite it, plug it, play it, burn it, rip it, drag it, drop it, zip and zip it, lock it, fill it, call it, find it, view it, code it, jump and lock it, surf it, scroll it, pose it, click it, cross it, crack it, switch updated, name it, read it, tune it, print it, scan it, send it, tax 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 micro tasks 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. 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, 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 JCR 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 without 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, the 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 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 humancule, 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, 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 spectrum 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 Zygmunt 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 the 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 eight years ago, there was a lot of discussions revolving around the question of quality. So the argument was that all these exuberant 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 suites and stuff because he made it appear so great and so difficult and attractive to be allowed to paint the fence. 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 organize and all work together to create a new civilization and to fix a broken world. So that's the rhetoric and that says we can replace politics with Wikimics 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 privatized and usually are only beneficial for those people doing the crowdsourcing process so it's an extraction of knowledge of content of labor 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. 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 there in the term of Christopher Calty 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 labor was right there from the beginning. The term was meant to refer to that is that Jeff Howell who introduced the term said it's the new pool of cheap labor. Everyday people using their spare cycles to create content and so on for free. So one important point therefore is that crowdsourcing is about labor or crowd work. I think the term digital labor is very important. It's a term coined by Trebor Schultz. 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 labor. It's all about how to get better ideas and how to foster innovation and so on. And they never mentioned that it's labor 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 organized 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 2,000 crowdsourcing platforms. So it's very tricky to capture the problem with such a variety. But 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 gray 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 many reasons, 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. 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 piecework or microtasking or accord-arbitre 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 time and you're putting a lot in 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're constantly getting better, that you are rising in the hierarchy of the platform that you are working on. So real-world examples are the employee of the month but also all these bonus point 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 but so many people count that in. I'm a little bit sceptic of that. So Nicolas Carr came up with the term sharecropping. I find that quite suitable. If you look at volunteer crowd work, the most famous example in Germany I guess is Gutmann Pluck where you had a large crowd working on discovering the plagiarism of Karl Theodor and so people put in their work time because they believe in the goal of taking this guy down basically. But it's still something where the crowd really has a use of what they produce in the sense. Very recent example is Tomnert 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 eight 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 tried to crowdsource shop lifters and you could watch the surveillance cameras from small shops. And what is still active is this project, it's called FaceWatch ID. It's also by the British police and it's about you basically enter your postcode and then you can see if you might be able to recognize criminals in your neighborhood from your iPhone. 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 the 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 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, a symmetry between those giving out the work and those having to do it. And so for example the people who 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 $5.00 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 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 TerCopticon 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 information 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 Jochai Benkler, the guy who came up with the term common space 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 you don't, 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, 99 Designs, who have about 300,000 registered designers working for them, explain their business model to you. Welcome to 99 Designs, the number one marketplace for crowdsourced creative design. What makes 99 Designs different? With 99 Designs, 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. 99 Designs 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 99 Designs and similar platforms, they are growing like topsy. A few years ago, there was a lot of protest 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. I think this is not going to happen. So 99 Designs, for example, acquired I think $35 million 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 stacks so to speak, without doing much. 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, 99 Designs 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 $1.50 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 and you have two choices basically. You yourself 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 read 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. And so that's a 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 lesson is another platform in 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 3000 and so that's the most successful guy there and so in every fifth time only he gets paid for his work. And if you see the most successful people sorted after the success rate like 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 like 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 and 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. And 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 10,000 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 Querky and they are quite amazing. They now have 800,000 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 35,000 stores with a very high production rate. They make a lot of money actually and they have this weekly evaluation process where the 150 employees of the company vote together with the community which projects are going to move forward. And Querky actually is putting a lot of work in there so the community contributes the ideas and refines them but Querky 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 $33,000 through the sales and through being 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 800 or so who have also influenced this idea and also get like a tiny fraction of the revenue. And Querky, this is the most successful guy on Querky, he already earned $600,000 for a very clever steck doser. 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 $176 million in venture capital that Querky acquired and they make $18 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 Jovoto, 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 and so it's not a winner takes it all model but there may be five winners who take sums from like 10,000 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 goes forward with it is you get paid for that extra and in contrast to the design logos, the logo design you don't produce the full product, you produce the idea and so there is a big difference. So, they really try to organize it as fair as possible and so you see how the pricing is organized and plus a licensing fee and so I think they do a lot of things right and they are very aware of the exploitation of fairness problem in crowdsourcing. That 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. Okay enough examples, back to the question from the beginning. So can crowd design 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 your Voto 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 your Voto, Bastia Nunterberg and two other guys, they wrote quite a good inside book about crowd sourcing, 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 such den Superstar or rather the other way around but I think it's horrible to have like a working situation where you have this system of everybody competing to everybody 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 is this moral philosopher called John Rolz 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 up front have like 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 to when you land there to move up or if you it's basically an unfair system and so I think this is an important point of how 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 send stuff to developing countries and be in this powerful position or do you see the whole system and also the other side. And 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 Geron Lanie 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 with Facebook and so on, where you have like 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 and we should implement a system where everything we do gets paid a tiny amount and so it piles up. 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 bedingungsloser Grundeinkommen, like a general basic income which also sounds tempting because then I mean 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 Grundeinkommen. 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 like the final solution or the perfect idea or so. 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 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 neoliberal 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. So I think it's important to stand up against that. So thank you. Yes, thank you very much for the 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 OpenIDO 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 OpenIDO 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're not being paid in order to be visible or apply to jobs. It's super interesting that you mentioned it. Can I ask you back, how do you know that? Because I keep hearing that and I think it makes total sense that it's basically like an externalized internship system but it's hard to prove that. Have you made this experience or? 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. Yeah, 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. 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? Well, I think that the intrinsic motivation that 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 work 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. So I see a question over there. Thanks. Hi. 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? Well, I think that it's problematic when you outsource obligations that clearly belong to the state, to the crowd, to save money. Because you also don't know what the motivation of people is who participate in these surveillance projects. Even with the Gutenberg thing, the Gutenplug. 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 El Gore is doing this project that is called Reality Drop where he basically crowdsourced a fight against climate change deniers where you have 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 transparent what people are motivated by and who guides them through gamification for example. And also like with the state thing I think you should not pay like head hunting fees or gamified bonus point systems for tracking down criminals. It's like the wild, wild west so into the wild it's 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 very new 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 I think 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, do that. All right, we have time for one or two more questions. Oh, over there. There is one more issue about crowd sourcing. If a 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 is a platform for example, a very old platform already like 12 years old, Innocentif that is where people solve research and development problems for big chemical corporations for example. 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 who did this wine opening thing, he said that if he has like a really good idea he first goes to platforms where nobody can see his idea and then if they, 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 them with the next presentation. Thank you.
So it's about the crowdsourcing of design work, crowdsourcing be organized in a way that is fair and sustainable for all stakeholders? And it's a the beginning. So can crowd design or at the problems with crowdsourcing policing or