Weekly task 5 Ideagoras - Saimi Jukkara

Ideagoras sites are places where both representants of different companies and organisations and individuals can gather together in order to exchange ideas and solutions to different kinds of problems. These places are open and basically anyone can join to them.

The biggest advantage for individual users is that they are able to share their knowledge and usually also gain some profit from it. For example, Amazon Mechanical Turk (https://www.mturk.com) advertises itself as a way to work from home and gain money by doing HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks). These HITs are at many times quite easy in a way that it does nor require that much effort but the paycheck is also quite small - beginning from 0.01$.

I think that this kind of thing could actually be a good hobby for people. Many of the HITs are basic things that do not require much special knowledge. For example, people are asked to rewrite some sentences or tell what they thing about some particular sentence (is it positive or negative and so on). There are also some sort of education for people. For example the Mechanical Turk requires people to do "WebReviews Qualification Master Test" in order to do that kind of HITs.

Of course there are also more difficult tasks. In these cases the disadvantage for individuals is that the requester who has made the HIT becomes the owner of the piece of work. For example in Amazon Mechanical Turk the people who answer tho HITs has to accept a Participation Agreement. In this agreement it is said that "As a Provider, the Requester for whom you provide Services is your client, and as such, you agree that the work product of any Services you perform is deemed a "work made for hire" for the benefit of the Requester, and all ownership rights, including worldwide intellectual property rights, will vest with the Requester immediately upon your performance of the Service.". (https://www.mturk.com:443/mturk/conditionsofuse)

So basically this means that if someone really comes up with a superb idea the payment of that can be just a dollar or so and the profit for the company can be counted in millions.

From companies these kind of webpages can be a really good source of information. This does not mean only new innovations and such but also smaller issues. For example, a company could do a user survey of their webpages through this kind of service and ask people to give ideas to improve their webpages, find broken links and so on. Furthermore there are HITs for translations to different languages and so on. Naturally this is an easy and also quite cheap way of gaining this kind of information for the company. I do not think that many companies for example in Finland are using these kind of services so for example a small or medium sized company could really profit from them. It can be really a lot cheaper to pay 0.01$ for "normal people" to do surveys than hire a professional to gather the information.

Personally I am a little bit sceptic for these kind of portals to really share a high-value ideas and innovations but for different kinds of smaller tasks they are a good tool.