Burak Arikan

Bio

Burak Arikan is an artist and researcher based in New York and Istanbul. He creates networked systems that evolve with the interactions of people and machines. His work confronts issues ranging from cultural sustainability to participatory economy, to art and politics in networked environments.

Abstract

User Labor

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, which is currently a monetized asset for the service provider but not for the user herself. We believe that universal, transparent, and self-controlled user labor metrics will ultimately lead to more sustainable social web.

User Labor is initiated by Burak Arikan and Engin Erdogan.