Worker-Community: Using crowdsourcing to link informal workers with potential clients

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm that is changing the way people establishes contact and works with others. The crowd is used to make people collaborate and solve problems that are difficult to answer without having many brains working together. Some of the applications of crowdsourcing include the capacity to create new employment opportunities to informal workers who seek for potential clients in the street. This paper presents Worker-Community, a new platform to link informal workers with potential clients in Mexico City. Our approach is based on the study of informal workers in order to know how they reach potential clients and the study of these clients to know their needs. A contextual study was carried to propose a prototype to create employments and assure security to all the people involved. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.