Crowd Work

摘要

Crowd Work is a phenomenon of the digital economy as well as of the modern IT era. It provides a great potential for changing the way in which businesses create value. For instance, the gold producer Goldcorp~1 made its geographical databases available to the public and offered a prize to anyone who could tell them where to find gold. The results of this open call enabled Goldcorp to increase its gold production from 53,000 to 504,000 oz a year, while it cut production costs from $360 to $59 per ounce. As a consequence, the value of Goldcorp increased from $100 million to $9 billion. This example illustrates Crowd Work as a form of gainful employment that creates digital goods and services by using human, informational, and physical resources or makes extant use of digital tools (Alter 2013). In general, work is a purposeful and conscious activity. By contrast, gainful employment denotes the part of work individuals expend to ensure the means of subsistence and income generation.