

The Long March from Crowdsourcing to a Global Meritocracy - sushimako
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/the_long_march_from_crowdsourcing_to_a_global_meri.php

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dasil003
I think the closest you can get to this is Mechanical Turk, which works for a
large volume of relatively menial tasks and that's about it.

The fundamental issue here is that work is increasingly shifting into
knowledge work, and knowledge work requires personal relationships and trust.
Even assuming you can somehow bridge the trust and fraud gap to create a
viable micropayment system for this work—and that's one overwhelmingly huge
if—you still have the problem that the newcomer doesn't understand your
company culture and the nuances of how you do business.

The idea that there are people out there who can magically solve your
company's problems is horse shit. The few really talented people who would
"get it" and hit the ground running probably are already super busy. Otherwise
people need time to learn how to do the job. In a startup this is done with
(hopefully) a smarter tight-knit team iterating rapidly. In a huge company
this is done by policies and procedures laid out over time to allow people to
be more interchangeable. But in either case you need long-term personal
relationships for the employee to realize their value to the company.

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microarchitect
_The idea that there are people out there who can magically solve your
company's problems is horse shit. The few really talented people who would
"get it" and hit the ground running probably are already super busy._

As it becomes easier for people to find work, folks who could have done some
work but were never given an opportunity to do so will get those
opportunities. Basically the talent pool will expand.

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byoung2
_As it becomes easier for people to find work, folks who could have done some
work but were never given an opportunity to do so will get those
opportunities. Basically the talent pool will expand._

That's an important point. There are people out there who are able to do work,
but who can't find a job where they live. This is the case in the Philippines,
where there are highly-educated people (I personally know people with
engineering degrees who literally cannot find jobs). Giving these people the
opportunity to do a few hours of work here and there, especially at
competitive rates offered by a global marketplace, will definitely expand the
talent pool.

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eykanal
There are two other significant problems here.

1\. __Job security __. Most people seem to appreciate having a steady source
of income. For a company to regularly outsource their jobs to the "smartest
person" means that all the other "smart but not smart enough people" are
without a job. So long as those other people are still able to find regular
employment (i.e., exist within the traditional model), they'll do that,
leaving fewer and fewer people available in the crowdsourcing pool.

2\. __Quality of job seekers. __While it's true that in a meritocracy, the
best rise to the top, this works best in a fairly small environment. If the
entire ecosystem of web developers was required to compete for every single
job, and anyone seeking a developer had only the entire ecosystem to look
through, finding an "appropriate match" would become far too daunting, and the
employers would be forced to reduce the rigor with which they vetted potential
employees. This allows weaker candidates to get potentially good jobs. As a
result, the more qualified candidates leave, and the meritocracy system is
ruined.

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Unseelie
I think the whole point of the involvement of computers and the internet as
fair godmother in their scenario was to handwave away problem 2 through
someone else's very hard work at making a very, very good process for
automatically vetting potential employees.

~~~
brunooo
+1 (incl the right equilibrium strategies)

Ad pt 1: Absolutely agree, but a gradual shift could also have supply/demand
adoption curves overlapping quiet neatly.

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brd
During startup school Zuckerberg said something along the lines of 'a company
is the most efficient way to align a large group of people to solve a problem'
and this is going to be the fundamental obstacle to a true crowdsource model.

You need to be able to build up your domain knowledge as a company, not just
tap into the knowledge of others temporarily. There is also the 800 lbs
gorilla of support which can probably never be effectively solved via a pie-
in-the-sky everyone does what they enjoy model. Pursuing your passion is
simply not scalable, sure there will be plenty of people that get away with it
but it is not feasible to say everyone will be able to. Someone needs to mop
the floors, clean the toilets, and answer calls to the help desk.

At the end of the day I agree that freelance will probably become more
prevalent and the commoditization of software components will certainly reduce
the need for in-house expertise. These forces will bring us closer to the
authors vision but the demand for support and in-house knowledge will herd us
into monolithic organizations for the foreseeable future.

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john_horton
I think he's essentially correct on the macro trends that will move the world
more to this kind of model.

On the specific point on what's holding back a more distributed/networked
model of production, I think one obstacle is that labor is not easily
"commoditized" in a way that facilitates trade (see
<http://crowdresearch.org/chi2011-workshop/papers/horton.pdf> for more on
this).

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mnemonicsloth
I suggest changing that headline, because it's an obscenity.

Mao Zedong committed genocide against China's intelligentsia. The class of
people he murdered were part of China's tradition of Confucian meritocracy.
The Long March was the military campaign where Mao won power. So that title is
about as bad as talking about a Final Solution to the problem of racism.

