User Labor is here!
Today is Labor Day, a celebration of the economic and social achievements of workers around the world. Just the right time to introduce our new project, User Labor, to address the issue of the economic sustainability of social web services.
With User Labor, we propose an open data structure, User Labor Markup Language (ULML), to outline the metrics of user participation in social web services. Our aim is to construct criteria and context for determining the value of user labor for distribution. We believe that universality, transparency, and accessibility of user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable service cycles in social web.
User Labor is a product of Meta-Markets. While working on fair-values, we had a hard time extracting consistent usage data from web services, because there are no standards on what information web services offer through their APIs. Therefore, it is difficult to talk about user participation in a unified way across services, which is essential for assigning value to assets in Meta-Markets.
Once we finished working on the first draft, we realized that User Labor should not be limited to Meta-Markets, it can have a much broader application. Ultimately, we are hoping that the metrics in ULML can initiate discussions around rewarding the content providers of social web and creating sustainable participation economies.
Here is a screenshot of how you can see your labor in Meta-Markets. Clicking View User Labor link will provide you with a breakdown of your participation in Meta-Markets terms until today.
You can read more at User Labor website.
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