Ethical aspects of crowdsourcing, or is it a modern form of exploitation

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model, first crowdsourcing mentioning in literature is dated in 2006. Crowdsourcing is new phenomenon in business, which appeared due to new possibilities of Web 2.0. Main Crowdsourcing advantage for entrepreneurs is opportunity to cut labour costs. Part of Crowdsourcing opponents criticizing it for human exploitation. Present paper has two goals, first of all to find out what does exploitation really mean from philosophical perspective and the second to determine Crowdsourcing activities participant's attitude to the fact of exploitation. The biggest part of previous research was dedicated to contributors’ motivation, what moves them to take part in certain project. This work scrutinize participant’s attitude to their previous experience in Crowdsourcing and motivation to repeat it again, that has substantial importance to Crowdsourcing sustainability in long term perspective. Taking into account, that method itself is realized by means on Internet, the research is conducted on-line, based on Crowdsourcing intermediate platform “Amazon Mechanical Turks”, and has wide geographical coverage. Present research is interesting not only to academia circles, but also to socially responsible entrepreneurs, who is interested in applying this tool, maintaining high level of ethics and moral.