Why decentralize micro-tasks? What’s there to gain?
Fragmentation of work
In the past, you would work for the same company for ten years. Now, you can work for ten different companies in a single day.
This is micro-tasking. Tonnes of companies with heaps of data they need humans to process. To us, it looks like this:
Fragments will allow tasks to be scaled across all kinds of devices, reaching millions of users and tapping into a workforce that’s always online. Of course, it is not the first micro-task platform. There is the incumbent king, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but it’s clunky: no mobile app, no extendibility (discounting iFrame), and no incentives for developers.
It is clear that the current state of adoption of micro-tasking is just the beginning. Machine learning for self-driving cars, voice-recognition or object-recognition are already familiar concepts, but Fragments empowers developers to create new micro-task apps which expand to areas that micro-tasking has not yet penetrated.
What we gain through decentralization
If the future workforce is globalized, with millions of people performing millions of app-based micro-tasks, a decentralized platform is a more efficient solution.
If the core of the micro-tasks platform is built using a decentralized architecture, users do not have to put their trust in our hands. The decentralized application (DApp) can be trusted in and of itself without having to enter into a traditional contract. All parties know exactly what is in it for them — rewards for workers, commission for developers and improved results for companies.
Everything beyond the DApp is extendable by developers, who can charge commission for use of their micro-tasks apps. The free market handles the rest — you are not forced to use a particular app if the fees are too high compared to the value you get from it.
Through the free market and app monetization, developers will be motivated to find areas where micro-tasks can be utilized and create apps for them. Moreover, it will drive competition for annotators among the micro-task apps/developers, meaning there will be a strong push towards creating a convenient working environment where annotators can complete tasks efficiently and comfortably. This in turn leads to greater efficiency across the whole market — lower prices for companies requesting tasks and higher earnings for annotators. Through these mechanisms, micro-tasks will be able to spread to a wide variety of new areas and eventually become omnipresent.
We envision millions of mobile-first workers engaging with first-class user interfaces, thousands of micro-tasks apps for tasks we can’t even conceive today, and easy integration to near-realtime workflow for companies. Fragments will become a hub where human intelligence gathers, always available to query.
The challenges ahead
It is not enough just to build the DApp. We need to ignite the whole ecosystem that surrounds it — SDKs, APIs, knowledge base, mobile apps, partnerships, and tackle scalability.
There will be compromises but our approach is pragmatic. Fragments will start as a de/centralized hybrid and progressively decentralize the parts that will benefit from it.
We are building on three core concepts:
1. DApp — The heart of the micro-task platform
We will build a core DApp, which addresses several key issues, such as: payments for micro-tasks; distribution of work; consensus mechanisms to ensure tasks are properly completed , etc. There are still scalability issues to address, so we will tackle them with off-chain solutions for now.
While our current, working prototype is built using Solidity and the Ethereum blockchain, we are also assessing other options.
2. Micro-tasks apps can be monetized by developers
Key to Fragments’ success is enabling developers to easily extend the platform and realize new types of micro-tasks, by creating completely new interfaces.
Developers will be able to set commission rates for every micro-task completed in their micro-task app, creating an incentive to refine usability.
The Chrome extension store might serve as inspiration. Using JavaScript would enable us to extend our service across all platforms (desktop, web, mobile) at once.
3. Public Token License (PTL): a new open-source license
The Fragments ecosystem is offered freely to developers, companies, and individuals who wish to deploy and use micro-task apps for their own projects.
To ensure that the Fragments token remains the sole means for payment and commissioning apps through our platform, we are creating a new, open-source license that obligates anyone using the Fragments platform to also agree to use the Fragments token.
Creating a new open-source license enables us to open-source the Fragments platform to anyone from day one, while preventing companies from creating their own silos of separate, private blockchains.
We plan for it to be a modified GPL license which obliges companies to participate using the same public blockchain and token.
We know that a new license may be controversial, so we would love to hear the community’s take on it. For now, it will be called the Public Token License — let us know if you have an idea for a better name!
Join the Fragments movement!
We need you, our community, to help us achieve our global ambitions. With your help we can bring Fragments to life and create the workforce of the future.
Join Community on Telegram: https://t.me/fragments
See our website: https://fragments.network
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/fragments
— Fragments team
