This Thursday at Change, Nathan Breit, Peter Lipay, Jennifer Apacible, and Fransiskus Xaverius will be leading a discussion on the use of Amazon Mechanical Turk for development. Mechanical Turk is a crowdsourcing system which pays people small amounts of money for completing tasks that are difficult for computer to accomplish. A person or business can post a Human Intelligence Task (HIT), along with the fee they will pay for the task’s completion, on the Mechanical Turk website. “Turkers” can complete these tasks for a few pennies a task. Examples of HITs are locating information on a document, identifying the content of images, translating foreign languages, transcribing speech, as well as comparing audio to written transcripts. Researchers in ICTD have proposed the potential value of Mechanical Turk as an employment opportunity for low income workers in developing countries. We will be discussing the moral and economic implications of this type of work, looking specifically at the business models of two crowdsourcing NGOs Samasource and CrowdFlower. Please join us for sandwiches, and to learn more about Mechanical Turk for development! What: Discussion on Mechanical Turk for Development When: Thursday, Feb 10th at noon Where: Paul Allen Center, Room 203