Introduction

We here in central Washington can arguably say that the ground hog was wrong this year because we’re starting to experience spring-like weather in-between the periodic temper tantrums of winter as it is dragged kicking and screaming into recent history. This means that the fire I keep warm under my bicycle touring pot is once again stocked and the pot is now boiling over with plans and potential.

I’ve been inspired to investigate some of the new technologies and services that are appearing at various places on the web. One of these, “crowdsourcing”, could provide bicycle tourists the world over with access to a temporary and much needed labor pool. Imagine for instance you’re somewhere between here and there and you realize, miles into a multi-month tour across some continent or other that you need a part FedExed to the next village post haste. You could call Mom, but what if she’s on a tour of her own? Now what do you do? There’s only so much longer that you can continue to limp along with those pig iron rims and it sure would be better than cheese and crackers if someone would take care of getting the replacement pair to the inn you’re now camped out in before your pocketbook is completely drained.

I’ve been testing Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to see if this might provide me with the labor I need to fix some of these kinds of problems as the crop up on longer tours. I’ve started to build a little resource pool of worker credit with the intent of learning what it might take to get a complete stranger to help me complete routine tasks all the way to bail me out if and when the situation calls for it.

Many of the worker tasks I’ve found and been qualified to complete at Amazon’s Mechanical Turk have been online, but occasionally there’s one that will require more than just a mouse hand and an internet connection to complete. Today for instance I accepted and completed a task to:

• Print a document out twice
• Go around town posting the 16 sheets of the document up in public places
• Take a photo of at least one of them
• And post that photo somewhere the Requestor could see it

It was a pretty straight forward task although the pay is a bit low. Actually, what people are willing to offer for the work they want done doesn’t really make it competitive, but I imagine that this might change over time.

So what is “Turking” and Should I be Offended?

First you should not be offended, even if you happen to be of Turkish descent. There’s nothing derogatory or inflammatory in the statement that would hint at malignant intent. In fact, it’s a oblique reference to the Mechanical Turk; which was an invention of a fellow named Wolfgang von Kempelen in the mid-1700s. The device was billed as a box that contained an expert chess player, but which at first glance appeared to be an automaton of exceptional artificial intelligence.

The idea behind “turking” is that you can use technology to complete tasks that humans are best suited to. Amazon has taken it a step further by making it possible to access large resource pools of qualified humans via a croudsourced model.

I first ran across this idea while reading a novelette by Tobias Buckell called Stoasti-city which is part of a shared creation SF project of many up and coming writers. In the story croudsourced tasks drive the city of Detroit toward a new awakening and the effect is quite profound. Better it all seems to happen on technology and by way of networks that are already in place today. The story itself is an exciting exploration of the framework that I’m sure you’ll enjoy as much as I did.

The reality of turked out networks isn’t quite as grand in implementation today as it is in Toby’s imagination of the future. There are a lot of people trying to get you test or contribute to their projects by way of a mouse and a modem. Step one, go to this web site. Step two, say something about my thing, step three do another thing, et cetera.

What am I willing to do and for how much?

Seems like a pretty easy question to ask yourself before you start asking complete strangers to run all over town for you for what can be arguably tiny amounts of money. How much time should I expect my task to be completed it? How will I find the right person to do what I need at the right time? Other questions abound, but they are all potentially answerable. I figured I’d start to root out the associated answers but acting as the turk for a while.

Last night for instance I accepted a HIT (Human Intelligence Task) that had a considerably more restrictive time limit than was necessary to complete the task. Someone wanted 20 trivia questions, their associated answers, and three plausible answers delivered in 60 minutes all on a single theme. I tried, but the time expired when I had only 13 completed. I never got to submit the task and the requestor lost out on my contribution efforts because the assigned timeline was too restrictive. Lesson learned, give your turk at least the time it might take you to complete the task or maybe a little more.

I’ve passed over other HITs as well because what was being asked of the turk was either very time intensive, the contract did not come with a reasonable compensation, or both. For instance, there have been several article writing contracts that have popped up on in my queue which offered merely a dollar or two in compensation, but would have required an hour or two of my time. I’m not desperate so why bother? Lesson two learned, ensure you’re not too cheap when you ask for complex or time consuming tasks to be completed.

Finally, there are some tasks that appear to have been around since the dawn of time. I’ve passed over these because, frankly, they are boring. I mean like mind numbingly boring. And because there are some tasks that I can accept which are interesting or which represent the potential for a good time these are merely a speed bump on my way to turking success. Lesson three; if you need something done that you wouldn’t want to do yourself because it might turn the contents of your cranium to mush you either need to sweeten the contract with really silly amounts of money or expect that no one will ever complete your task (including you).

Today’s Turk

Today I was paid (albeit just a little) to ride my bike around town putting up posters for someone’s art project. The first thing I want to point out here is that finally someone *paid* me to ride my bike. I mean can you believe it? So what if my sponsorship was only a $1.50 minus paper and ink, I was still paid baby! Yeah! W00t! Daddy got paid to ride his bike!

Ok, just needed to get that out of my system. I apologize to those of you who make vastly larger sums of money anytime you sit astride a saddle and turn a crank. Lance Armstrong, know that if ever our bike riding incomes are compared I will lie and tell them that I made a whole pot of gold. Your bottom line is safe with me, buddy.

The reason I did what I did had nothing to do with the money. This was an experiment in the interest of science! Imagine if you will a situation you could find yourself in should you be capable of putting together a long duration tour across some vast amounts of land astride a bicycle. Maybe you’re helping to pay the bills while you’re on the road by stopping over in various places speaking on the topic of your tour (as it progresses) and presenting digital images of the places you’ve visited to modest crowds at college campuses across the country.

So it occurs to me, wouldn’t it be great if there were posters hung all over these campuses preparing the crowds for your impending visit? You could wait until you arrive there, end up looking around for a printer, and then stumble around an unfamiliar campus trying to find the best places to hang your poster to get said crowd ready for your visit. All the while waiting and camping relatively stationary for a time while the excitement builds.

Or, you could try to turk the task from the road. Days or even weeks before you arrive at your destination.

I accepted the HIT today because I wanted to see what it might actually take, how much time it might cost etc to get something like this done. Even better this is an interesting HIT because I was able to ride around on my bike, poking my head into shops, asking for permission to hang a flyer in the window, riding around campus finding all the bulletin boards, and visiting coffee shops and talking with strangers (while sampling their beans).

Future Turking Experiments

I plan on continuing to build a modest pool of resources by working as a turk when time and availability of interesting jobs allow. Once I’ve built a reasonable reserve I will reinvest the money I’ve earned (plus potential augmentation capital) back into the system to see if I can get people to do some of the following tasks:

• Complete minor or low resource tasks from anywhere
• Complete major or higher resource tasks from anywhere
• Complete minor or low resource tasks from specific locations
• Complete major or high resource tasks from specific locations
• Complete tasks on a timeline
• Use integrated services (such as PayPal) to achieve tasks that exceed the services which can be provided via the MTurk system (e.g. go to a specific location after receiving money from me to buy a thing then send it along. The money would to buy the thing and the shipping would have to be conveyed via PayPal in this instance, but compensation for the task would run through MTurk).
• Help me complete larger scale practical jokes

Perhaps not this year, but at some point in my future I intend to take this show on the road. From time to time I will know that I will need a support resource that I can reasonable count on to get things done for me in my absence. This system has the potential to meet such a role requirement, if I can figure out how best to use it.

Sunday, March 1st, 2009 @ 6:18 pm Animal, Mechanical
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