In letzter Zeit war es erstaunlich still um Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” Plattform. Die Plattform hat sich immer mehr zum lautlos schwebenden Mutterschiff der Microtask-Anbieter gemausert. Auf der Crowdololis Konferenz am 19.07. wird sich Sharon Chiarella – Vice President von Amazon – diesen Thematiken stellen. Wir haben uns vorab mit ihr unterhalten und Sie gefragt, was sie persönlich so faszinierend am Thema Distributed Work findet.

Nora: What was the impulse for launching Mechanical Turk?
Sharon: Mechanical Turk, which launched in 2005, began life as a service that Amazon itself needed. Amazon had millions of Web pages that described individual products, but it wanted to weed out the duplicate pages. Software could help, but algorithmically eliminating all the duplicates was impossible. We needed an effective way to distribute work to a broad community of Workers. We realized that many companies had similar tasks – tasks that humans could do better than computers, so we decided to make it available as a marketplace where business with work and people looking to do work could find each other.

Nora: Who’s using it and for which purpose?
Sharon: Businesses – from startups to enterprises – are using Mechanical Turk for a broad range of use cases, everything from web site content management to content creation to research and transcription. As an example, companies that allow customers to contribute content – for instance uploading pictures and posting comments or reviewing products – want to make sure this user generated content complies with their site guidelines so they’re asking Mechanical Turk Workers to answer a series of questions about the user generated content- does it contain explicit content, is it spam.

Nora: Who uses Mechanical Turk/Is it especially for certain costumers?
Anyone can work on Amazon Mechanical Turk. We have casual workers who work a few hours a week, for instance college students who work to buy books, stay at home moms who work while the kids are napping and use the money they earn to buy groceries. Others are full timers who earn a living from Amazon Mechanical Turk. One of the things that workers tell us they like about Amazon Mechanical Turk is that it gives them the flexibility to work as much or as little as they like and it gives them a wide variety of HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) to choose from.

Nora: Why Crowdsourcing?
Sharon: There are still many things that humans do better than computers – image recognition, language processing, translation, transcription, OCR, content creation to name just a few. These tasks require human intelligence and Mechanical Turk. And because Mechanical Turk is a marketplace for outsourcing work, we’re giving people and businesses access to an on-demand, scalable workforce from around the world.

Nora: Thank you so much for the interview!

Am 19.7. spricht Sharon auf der Crowdopolis Konferenz 2012 in Los Angeles.