PajamaNation Venezuela: The press meeting June 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a commentCountry Managers for PajamaNati0n Venezuela forged ahead by holding a successful press launch last month.
Trabajando en Pijamas Libre y Feliz: The press meeting …
But this was not like any other press launch, Ricardo held it in an apartment, in his pyjamas. Then he explained the serious proposition behind the pajamanation global microjobs exchange.
Journalists were invited, and a sponsor who covered expenses and donated a prize. As a result, within a few weeks Venezualan Pajamaworkers have rapidly swelled in numbers and been joined by new microjobs providers and more microjobs for them to bid for.
Work PLEs internet futures and social relations June 8, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, edublog , add a commentA little spat between Stephen Downes and Jay Cross triggered by the current discussion around Personal learning Environments ( PLE ) may help to uncover important fundamentals.
Jay Cross seems to think that the social revolution against corporate ownership of the means of production has already happened:
Informal Learning Blog :: Nonsense from Stephen
In fact, fewer and fewer of us work for corporations; we’re doing our own thing. Free agent nation.
I just wonder how inclusive is that sense of “us” in the context being depicted here. There may well be the beginnings of a trend towards self employment, and free agency. I hope to encourage and enable that trend on a global scale through the pajamanation initiative , but at this stage it is still a dream of a possible future for the vast majority, and those small numbers who do currently make a living as freelancers are more often than not beholden to one or more large corporations for most of their future contracts.
Work life for the masses is still very much a question of handing over your time and labour power to the owners of capital in return for a fraction of the fruits of those labours, and the reality of so called “self employment” for a lot of trades is often nothing more than a tax ruse by the employers or a means to enable easy laying off of workers without liabilty for redundancy payment.
Within that environment, the ultimate purpose of corporate training is to benefit the sponsor, not the personel’s out of work hours life or future prospects at another employer or as a freelance.
So the reason why some people are passionate about genuinely personal PLEs is because of the potential to shift the locus of power and control in favour of the individual, and it’s no wonder they get twitchy when it seems like there’s a danger of the whole thing getting subsumed back under the wing of the corporate interests and educational institutions.
It’s not just about PLEs really, but the internet. The very existence of a global communications network with limited central control would appear to offer the possibility of a shift in the balance of power on a number of levels, and some of that is already happening to some extent, but is the mere existence of the technology sufficient? The iternet is still very much an infant in the process of being born and the future shape of how social and economic relations will be structured is possibly up for grabs, but perhaps the opportunity will only exist for a limited period. Underneath it all, the most fundamenal contention continues to resurface over who will end up owning and controlling the bulk of the means of production, the means of life. It could be a tiny tiny minority of billionairres as at present, it could be a collective of everybody acting as a whole, or it could be split up amongst all of us as individuals.
Testimonial June 5, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a commentPajamaNati0n Australia is the first country site in the global family to publish a genuine testimonial:
pajamanation was an excellent way to get a few jobs done fast and easy.
The Pajamaworker created a fantastic logo, she contacted suppliers for the printing and negotiated with them a great price. I couldn’t have done the job in that timeframe and/or I definitely could not have found a company to outsource this job for 200 Euro!
Katia Peeters, Falls of Sound Hearing services, Brisbane, Australia
The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards June 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a commentNothing to do with pajamanation - at present..
The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards | A Fistful of Euros
The Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards
by David WemanA Fistful of Euros proudlly presents the Third Annual Satin Pajama Awards, celebrating the best of the European blogosphere.
Startupping Forums May 14, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Community, blogs and community , add a commentI admire Mark Fletcher for the way he has been developing “Startupping”, transparently showing the process of his own business development at the same time as building a community of startup entrepreneurs. Now he’s able to showcase some of the interesting threads from the startupping forums by posting teasers on the blog, with a link to the forums RSS feed.
Weekly Summary - May 11, 2007 - Startupping Forums
Every Friday we summarize some of the interesting discussions taking place in the Startupping community:Here’s my startup idea, what are your thoughts?
Hi, I’d love if you could all shoot down my startup idea. I like to travel backback style, and since the 70s Lonely Planet has been the nr1 publisher of travel guides for this audience. But: there’s nowhere online where you can find good travel guides that include hostel prices and locations and maps (the 2 things LP is great at).
…. Read More ….Ease of development vs scaling question
I’m looking at languages and frameworks right now for the social news site I’m building this summer. I’m looking at the following: Ruby => Rails, Python => Django, Erlang => Erlyweb. One of my biggest considerations is ease of development/rapid deployment vs scaling.
…. Read More ….Scaling
For those of you who’ve been through the scaling wringer before: At what point did your site have problems with scaling? When did you have to start thinking about multiple web servers and database servers? What type of load balancing did you use? Where did you go to learn about this stuff?
…. Read More ….Getting advice on a partnership problem…
I am planning to start a new business in web services industry, together with one partner…. The problem is with my current partner. He holds same amount of share with me… (M)ost management matters, business planning and strategic issues seem to be solely on me….. I don’t want to share same amount profits with a person who don’t perform the same with me.
…. Read More ….Subscribe to the forums RSS feed and stay up to date with the conversations.
The world isn’t so flat May 10, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a commentThis emerges from my draft posts folder, but I’m puzzled by the title. Who thought the world was flat in the first place? I suppose service such as pajamanation could be seen as helping to flatten the world a little bit, by bringing equal global access to some particular niches of work opportunities. The infrastructure of the internet has a tendency to do that, but then it can create its own areas of complexity as well. If entropy was a universal fact then we wouldn’t be here at all and all the matter and energy in the world would be equally dispersed as a blanket of low density dust instead of thrown up into galaxies, planets, cities and web communities.
edublogs: The world isn’t as flat as we think
Once more the world is changing, to one where it’s no longer cheap labour and cheap ideas that you get out of the emerging economies of this planet. You’re now getting top class ideas, inspiration, creativity - and top salaries - which are on a more level playing field that most Westerners can quite comprehend.
BBC NEWS ¦ Business ¦ Indian firm ‘eyeing UK graduates’ April 24, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a commentEarlier this month, BBC news reported on the UK activities of Indian software services firm Wipro
BBC NEWS | Business | Indian firm ‘eyeing UK graduates’
Wipro hires 20,000 graduates each year in India, and faces competition from foreign multinationals also flooding into Bangalore.
As the demand for IT professionals has risen in India, Wipro has been forced to raise salaries twice in 2006.
Its existing clients include Nokia ,Thames water and the insurer Aviva.
Outsourcing work to countries such as India is a sensitive topic, with its skilled workforce and cheap labour seen by some as a threat to British jobs.
Every 10 minutes commute means 10% fewer social links April 23, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation , add a comment“There’s a simple rule of thumb: Every ten minutes of commuting results in ten per cent fewer social connections. Commuting is connected to social isolation, which causes unhappiness.”
Well at least Charles Arthur is aware of the increasing push for us to work at home, which is being facilitated by enterprises such as pajamanation
Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One April 7, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Microjobs, Long Tail , 2commentspajamanation has been described amongst other things as a platform for enabling a type of ‘crowdsourcing’ in the jobs market. So what does crowdsourcing mean?
Crowdsourcing: A Million Heads is Better than One
Crowdsourcing can be looked at as an application of the wisdom of crowds concept, in which the knowledge and talents of a group of people is leveraged to create content and solve problems. The official definition from the term’s originator, Jeff Howe, is “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call.”
Certainly the idea of splitting up one large job into smaller discrete components is present in the microjobs concept, but crowdsourcing seems to be more about getting lots of people to do the same thing, or similar parts of the same thing, and then averaging or otherwise analysing the outputs to create one new insight or product. Using a thousand eyeballs to search satellite photographs for a piece of floating ocean wreckage, each being allocated an adjacent few hundred square metres is a niche requirement that may be well suited to Amazon’s mechanical turk service, but microjobs are more suited to the long tail of requirements, where millions of niche tasks can be created, each one unique with its own short specification, terms and delivery style. There is some overlap in the concepts, but it would be worth explaining the differences at an early stage before the words are fully released into the wild to evolve and degenerate through popular usage into looser, woolier phrases with indistinct or inaccurate meanings.
What are microjobs April 1, 2007
Posted by Andy Roberts in : Pajamanation, Microjobs , add a commentAt the heart of the pajamanation project is the concept of microjobs
“Imagine a machine that you can put into any country and when you turn the handle, generate jobs. Not regular jobs, but microjobs: short jobs that you can do at home are done and when you are paid you go on a short holiday and you have the certainty when there is another microjob waiting for you. That is living a la carte.”
I know, it takes a little while for the Microjobs concept to sink in. This is not the same thing as telecommuting, working from home for the same employer you used to work for in the office. Nor is it the same as freelancing, where you agree to work on site for perhaps 3 weeks or 2 months for an employer who doesn’t want to create a permanent post. There’s more in common perhaps with the jobbing worker who travels around doing small jobs in which he is proficient for a large number of customers. If you need some private work done on your house you will usually employ a skilled worker who quotes a price to do the job. The advent of the digital age with the spread of broadband internet access means that a huge number of jobs that previously needed a persistent and physical presence, can now be done from home as and when convenient for the remote worker, and providing attractivly competitive terms and deadlines by doing so.
Some employers will jump at the chance to reduce their fixed labour costs and slim down their core business, but many will resist at first, not wanting to give up the control they have over employees lives even while they are not getting paid. They’d like to keep people on a retainer, always avaliable and never working for anybody else but that belongs to the old days now, it’s no longer realistic.
Companies and organisations who learn to make use of the advantages of getting work done through microjobs will begin to replace ones who don’t, and this process will then accelerate. So the microjobs concept when applied en masse, will bring about nothing less than the decentralisation of employment.
Thanks for reading Andy Roberts articles about Pajamanation
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