So I’m pleased to say in the past few days I received a direct inmail from somebody on one of my subscribed groups with the sensationalist subject line “Will it be BANNED?!”.  It turned out to be a fairly standard piece of junk or phishing email, this time trying to forward me to a site which sold cheap life insurance and was trying not to be shut down by the insurance “establishment.” Remember that “THIS SITE SAVES PEOPLE MONEY AND COULD BRING CERTAIN GREEDY BROKERS TO THEIR KNEES!”

The fake persona was called “Amanda Wales” – potentially an inept attempt to think of the most English name possible (apologies if you are reading this and your name actually is Amanda Wales). Her profile smelt extremely fishy.  Her work record said she was currently a manager at AXA UK Ltd, as well as a consultant at an unnamed insurance company,  but her profile said she was a VP at a company called DataCreatives and her education suggested she’d studied marketing at Harvard for 5 years.

A reverse image search at www.tineye.com showed her photo had originally appeared in a US newspaper and was somebody else entirely and a quick search showed her profile had been copied word to word for somebody who really was a VP at DataCreatives, who are based in Canada.   A closer look at the groups she’d joined, suggested she was members of various random ones with “London” in the name, including London, UK and London, Ontario, Canada.  She’d joined the group I’m in a few hours before I got spammed.

So quite clearly a fake ID. Although she has now disappeared just as mysteriously as she arrived, what astonishes me is that when I first checked in she had around 20 connections, and a few hours later she had about 45. Perhaps they were other fake IDs created by the same person, but I wonder if they were requests that have come from people who have joined the groups she did, or who had blindly accepted friend requests from her.

LinkedIn isn’t like Twitter in that the connections can actually mean something.  Accepting friend requests willy nilly or allowing anybody to join groups just exposes the valuable data of other connections, and encourages people not to share their connections with other connections, where often I find the value in LinkedIn lies.  The serendipity of receiving connection requests from people you don’t know and may be wanting to contact you for some reason can be fun, but at least make sure they exist before clicking on “yes.”

The most controversial area around crowdsourcing is clearly around levels of pay which are below minimum or living wages.  Some of this is to just to do with outsourcing work to countries where there are lower wage levels, a occasionally thorny issue, but one that clearly that has not  stunted the growth of the outsourcing industry.

However the sometimes near outrageous wage levels on Amazon Mechanical Turk are going to be rather more difficult to explain to ethical consumer groups trying to work out where to target their next campaign.

There has been a lot of adverse publicity over the years for the alleged use of sweatshop labour for example at Nike and Primark, so why not users of crowdsourced labour?   The BBC covered some of the potential issues in a balanced article in 2010 about the rise of creating digital sweatshops.

Whilst I do believe the motives for Turkers are sometimes misunderstood and are not always necessarily financial (for example see an excellent post from Panos Ipeirotis about the relationship between pay and motivation on MTurk), it still doesn’t get away from the fact that the wage levels are extremely low.

I’ve signed up as a Turker and dipped my toe in the water and I have to say my own experiences do echo the pretty negative ones  of journalist Rachael King, who spent a day experiencing what she called “Mechanical Serfdom.” I plan to cover this in more detail in a future post.

I think there’s also often a lack of respect in some of the jobs offerings posted in services marketplace offerings.  I noted down one from a few months ago which had the line “job goes to the cheapest offer with the highest standard of English. Don’t even think of bidding above $3 per hour!”    That sort of tone isn’t going to sit too well on a global corporate’s CSR report.

Clearly the crowdsourcing industry is young and evolving very rapidly. But I do wonder if it does need to do more present a united front, have a clearer set of guidelines about what are acceptable levels of pay and work harder to police the murkier practices.  And in general I do think many companies – for example the main service marketplaces – are already moving in that direction.

Even if you disagree with me and think there’s nothing wrong with MTurk wage levels, it is still going to generate bad publicity in the media. So it’s possible that for the crowdsourcing industry to get it’s house in order not only makes sense ethically, but also commercially.

We featured them on IBF 24 and Ryan showed us their employee recognition software “Love Machine” where employees send each other “love” – essentially thank you messages which are open for all to see.  Ryan also gave us a demo of their new venture Coffee and Power, a sort of crowdsourced local task marketplace driven by virtual currency.

The thing that I always find really interesting is that transparency is threaded through all their products and the way they run the business.  They have a “worklist” which works a bit like a mini-oDesk or Elance. Here developers from around the world  can bid for work, interact with other developers and see all the code that has already been deployed. It’s also open for absolutely anybody to see on the web.

Now Love Machine have taken transparency to their new venture – the workclub – a free work café where you can mingle with other developers, which effectively doubles up as their office.  I guess it’s similar to some other co-working spaces, but in addition a large screen lets everybody know who’s on site to encourage professional networking.   Even the coffee’s free.

This physical workplace seems to match their digital workplace – you can peer in through the window and see exactly what’s going on. It’s great to see a company consistently innovating with an underlying philosophy delivered with both energy and humour.