As an aside: the default payment level for AutoMan is US minimum wage, and there is no built-in provision for differentiating wages based on the country of the worker.

Relevant - a related but different approach: AutoMan, a language for programming with people: http://www.automan-lang.org/

AutoMan is a platform for integrating human-based and digital computation. It allows programmers to "program with people", which appear to the programmer to be ordinary function calls. AutoMan automatically handles details like quality control, payment, and task scheduling. It is currently implemented as a domain-specific language embedded in Scala (a language that runs on any machine with a Java Virtual Machine), and uses Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a backend.

Technical paper at http://www.cs.umass.edu/~emery/pubs/AutoMan-UMass-CS-TR-2012-013.pdf, to appear at OOPSLA 2012.

(Disclaimer: I am one of the authors.)

This Google paper just appeared at the 5th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (a.k.a. FAST), the premier conference on file systems and storage. It won one of the best paper awards.

You might be interested in the other best paper award winner (in the shameless self-promotion department): TFS: A Transparent File System for Contributory Storage , by Jim Cipar, Mark Corner, and Emery Berger (Dept. of Computer Science, University of Massachusetts Amherst). Briefly, it describes how you can make all the empty space on your disk available for others to use, without affecting your own use of the disk (no performance impact, and you can still use the space if you need it).

Enjoy!

--
Emery Berger
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Massachusetts Amherst