TASKSOURCE @ CODE FOR EQUITY FELLOWS (IMPACT LABS)

The Problem

For the Code for Equity Fellowship through the Impact Labs organization, we were tasked to utilize our knowledge as technologists to work together in small teams and learn how to build sustainable, anti-racist, equitable products and systems. Each team centered around a specific social problem and the end product of the fellowship was a deliverable (whether a software, theory, or paper) that could be presented at the fellowship showcase.

The Solution

Over the course of 5 months, I worked collaboratively in a team of three to come up with a whitepaper and visual whitepaper summary that discusses unjust working conditions in the online crowdsourced data industry and what a proposed alternative would be to mitigate these issues and increase income for crowdsourced workers. The proposed solution, TaskSource, is a co-op structured theoretical platform that is rooted in the idea of worker ownership and community. Its cooperative structure allows it to be owned and managed by the people who work in it. TaskSource's incentive structure is based on ownership, time, and contributions rather than a model based solely on task completion. This structure is rooted in the idea that when workers receive a fair share of the total co-op’s profits, when a platform is built around worker community and quality that prevents bots, when a time rush is not placed on workers for their tasks, and when workers own what they create, the quality of data will inevitably increase.