A few weeks ago my mentors from my time at MSR/FUSE Labs back in 2015 published a draft of suggestions for anyone interested in designing a peer to peer labor market. You can find the paper here. In it, we make a number of suggestions that I think would be important for anyone who wanted to make these markets more worker-centric. You know. Hypothetically.

As part of the awesomeness that is Microsoft Research’s ethos, the paper is freely available to download. In the (highly unlikely) event that this ever changes, please contact me and I’ll fix it.

I tweeted about it, so you may have seen it there. If you think it’s interesting, or insightful, or naive, please contact me with your thoughts!

In unrelated news, I’m (still) figuring out how to blog about stuff. I want to blog about things I (ostensibly) know about, but usually I try to reserve all that writing energy for papers, and then when a paper is done I’d rather just point you readers to that (like with the paper from MSR). On the other hand, I’ve seen examples of amazing researchers (like Danah Boyd) making their blogs a space where they can publicly ruminate on nascent research ideas - ideas that maybe aren’t quite ready for formal scholarship (or, who knows, may never be). I want to be able to engage with the world like that, but I’m still figuring out how much time these ideas need to “steep” before I can/should share them.