Latest From Second Life Creator: Crowdsourcing Small Jobs

waderoush writes "At Linden Lab, Philip Rosedale led the creation of Second Life, a virtual world with a complex internal economy. Now he's applying some of the same ideas to the real world at Coffee & Power, a hybrid workclub and crowdsourcing marketplace for small jobs. The C&P site (which was itself crowdsourced via another Rosedale project called Worklist) matches sellers and buyers of services from personal shopping to software tutoring. Payments are handled using a virtual currency, and members can meet up to collaborate or deliver services at the C&P offices in San Francisco and Santa Monica. 'Coffee & Power is a tool that asks the question, 'If you had an extra three hours today, how many things could you do?'' Rosedale says. 'We all have a lot of skills that we don't use in our day jobs.'"

Comments

Important figures from article

[elrous0]

Average length of job: Half a day
Average pay of job: $12

So if you live in China, India, Nigeria, etc. and would love to work for $24 a day, great news! And for those you who live in the first world, well, enjoy the continued outsourcing that's going to have us all living in a goddamned Mad Max dystopia by the end of the century. Buy your Chinese-made shouldpads and dune buggies now.

Congratulations, you've invented virtual day labor

[idontgno]

How is this, in any fashion, different than a landscaping contractor rolling up to a street corner and spot-hiring half a dozen undocumented workers for an enjoyable day of grass-mowing and leaf-blowing at 7 bucks an hour?

What could possibly go wrong?

Just-in-time disposable employees

[Animats]

Rent-a-Coder, Mechanical Turk, Freelancer.com, and now this.

Manpower, Inc. is one of the US's largest "employers".

I hate this argument

[rsilvergun]

It's used by cheap labor conservatives to justify crap wages, especially for white collar IT workers. The argument goes it's OK to kill yourself making $3/hour because it's better than goofing off you lazy bastard. It's like when factory owners argued in the 19th century against the 40 hour work week because they lower classes would just spend it drinking anyway.

Hey, you know what? I like living in a world where there's more to life than endless toil. You think the rich bastards that shoved this crap down your throat in grade school work 70 hours a week? If you do, you haven't been paying attention. Here's an idea: Pay people enough to make a difference in their lives and see how much interest you get.

Tax

[Caerdwyn]

I wonder what the IRS, state tax boards, various employment/workplace regulatory bodies and such are going to have to say about this... they're going to want their cut of the action.

I also suspect the Treasury Department may have something to say about virtual currencies being used to pay for real-world goods and services. This ain't Second Life scripted wang-doodles we're talkin' about here. Scrip is a legal minefield.

This reminds me of Indian slum economies...

[phik]

A retailer needs 500 handbags to sell to rich women...

In the USA (and most traditional economies):

The retailer contacts a supplier who contacts a handbag company who contacts a factory in China who makes the bags and ships them to the retailer. For better or for worse, it's Capitalism in action where fancy bags come from big factories across the ocean.

In the slums of Mumbai:

The retailer contacts a supplier who goes into the slums and talks to poor women in their shacks and asks them to make him a couple bags each. He goes from shack to shack and picks up the two-three bags and gives the women a tiny payment. Then he goes to another neighborhood and distributes the bags to a dozen other ladies who stitch the patterns onto the bag. Someone else picks them all up or tells the ladies to bring the bags to another shack where they are counted and the women are paid a few cents each. The supplier ships the bags to the retailer. For better or for worse, it's crazy decentralized unregulated and unregulatable chaos Capitalism where fancy bags come from a hundred poor living rooms.

At least in the Chinese factories, workers are starting to demand better conditions and wages and there are standards and some regulations and standards in place. In India the workers get paid next to nothing because they are all working in their homes and don't have any idea who they are working for and aren't employees - work on contract only - and don't know any of their fellow workers so they can't unionize and demand better wages, and they work in their homes deep in slums so there is absolutely no regulation.

My point is that this kind of small crowdsourced job idea reminds me of the Indian model, and I don't like it.
Feel free to disagree though, what else is /. for?