While platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have generated excitement as a potential source of income in developing regions, to date there remains little evidence that such opportunities have transformed livelihoods for low-income workers.
The big discussion is the difference between crowdsourcing and, well, just crowd-harvesting. In the end, crowdsourcing should be a win-win situation for members of the crowd and the organization alike.
If we're not careful we'll just be developing systems that help the one but basically enslave the other.
