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.'"

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?

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.

Re:I hate this argument

[viperidaenz]

You're a bit off comparing it to employment. Try comparing it to a contracting market
The reason the average job is $12 is because thats what the people doing the work are willing to accept.
There is also little correlation between "Average job is $12" Average time for a job is 4 hours". A lot of 10 minute $10 jobs and a few 100 hour $6000 jobs would be enough to get those two averages - except the average $/hr is $60, not $3. I'm sorry you failed at maths.

ps: I'm a white collar IT worker. I don't accept contracts that pay $3/hr. Hell I don't even accept $NZ60/hr.

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.