Beta - Latest Comments in Sessions Top Ten Insights - Five

Re: Sessions Top Ten Insights - Five

Paul Youlten — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 07:58:03 -0000

Hi David, I totally agree.

Clearly attaching $-signs to a community can quickly generate a lot of interest; but anything less than transparant financial dealing is asking for trouble.

Also the more cash (and kudos) that is fed into the community the greater the opportunity to build a strong and vital community of interest - even if that interest is driven by purely commercial motives.

It is interesting to take a snapshot of community interchange rates. eBay take between 2 and 5.25%, Visa and Mastercard take between 1 and 5%. These services clearly represent good value to both sides of the within a highly competitive market place. mTurk have an interchange rate of 10% - which seems high, but they have quite a unique proposition at the moment. It will be interesting to see how it develops.

I think that we (Yellowikis) should aim to offer a zero percent interchange rate (where 100% of the revenue goes to the person doing the work.) - with a focus on s at a much higher value than mTurk (say $20 rather than $0.65 on mTurk). I'm sure that Yellowikis can make money from value added extras offered to both sides of the s.

So(in conclusion): Facilitating value exchange builds strong community; Greed in the community is the road to doom.

Re: Sessions Top Ten Insights - Five

David Gibbons — Tue, 08 Nov 2005 13:45:50 -0000

Money has to be added somewhere for it to be business, right?

It's how it's extracted that corrupts.

Are you implying that to avoid "undermining social motivations", that only the company that fascilitates the commons should extract value from it?

Surely this is exactly wrong, not only lookign at mturk, but also judging by the eBay example (and goog (adsense), amzn (associates pre-mturk).

I think if you plan to trade in the product of the community, not just offer it a service, then it makes sense to be upfront about it - not doing so, and extracting value without sharing it, is probably the fastest way to undermine peer's contributions.

Re: Sessions Top Ten Insights - Five

Paul Youlten — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 16:06:42 -0000

I think what Yochai means is that while eBay and Amazon have a clear commercial imperative that contributors understand (and can benefit from) from the get-go; Other projects like Wikipedia or Flickr would lose a lot of support if they started paying for some contributions and not others.

'Plan A' must be to act as the intermediary - like Amazon does with mTurk. Putting requests for help and helpers together and taking a small % of the .

Yellowikis will be testing mTurk as soon as we are able to.