Author Archives: Vili Lehdonvirta
About Vili Lehdonvirta
Dr Vili Lehdonvirta is a Visiting Fellow at the Asia Research Centre at London School of Economics and an Adjunct Professor of Economic Sociology at the University of Turku. He advises the World Bank's infoDev program and startup companies around the world on virtual economies, digital labor and ICT4D. He is currently on leave from Helsinki Institute for Information Technology and has previously held visiting positions at the University of Tokyo and Waseda University. Lehdonvirta has a PhD in Economic Sociology from Turku School of Economics and an MSc (Tech) from Helsinki University of Technology.From millions of tasks to thousands of jobs: Bringing digital work to the developing world
February 1, 2012ShareEvery country in the world has probably benefited in some way from the unprecedented access to knowledge and services brought about by the digital revolution. But producing the knowledge banks and services has so far been a predominately rich-country business. The world’s poorest countries have generally not been able to participate in the production side [...]
Bank, crowd, crowdsourcing, eBay, Facebook, Funding Circle, Loan, microtask, microwork, Person-to-person lending, RateSetter | Leave a commentGetting paid to party: what is the difference between work and play?
July 17, 2010Share Work and play: as concepts, they couldn’t be further from each other – right? Today, these two conceptual opposites are increasingly getting mixed up. Korean professional gamers make a living by competing in multiplayer games like StarCraft in front of television audiences of millions. Hundreds of thousands of virtual gold farmers in China, Vietnam [...]
Adam Smith, Crowdflower, EverQuest, games, gold farmers, Karl Marx, StarCraft, virtual currency, work | 6 CommentsSome work is born digital: from gold farmers to game masters
June 1, 2010Share Much has been said about the influence of information technology on work, and yet little of it has turned out to be overstated. The introduction of personal computers and local area networks to offices around the developed world in the late 1970s started a revolution in processes, which later translated to clear and measurable [...]
captcha, crowdsourcing, digital labor, human computation, Mechanical Turk, richard heeks, world of warcraft | 3 Comments
