Palmer wrote that she needs “professional-ish horns and strings for EVERY CITY to hop up on stage with us for a couple of tunes.”The pay for  a “quickie rehearsal” and performance?  ”Beer, hug/high-five you up and down (pick your poison), give you merch, and thank you mightily for adding to the big noise we are planning to make,” she wrote.

The post sparked a firestorm, as The Boston Globe reported Thursday, as several commenters accused Palmer of trying to get something for nothing. What made her request especially galling to some was that she recently raised $1.2 million from Kickstarter to fund her music.

The post and the blowback from it renews a debate over how ethical (moral?) it is to get free or near-free work out of people especially in these hard times.

One of the commenters on Palmer’s site, Chris Siebert, who described himself as a professional musician,  was clearly not amused:

With all due respect, your request for free labor sounds like a promotional gimmick dreamed up by a corporate republican who has no concept of the history of working people in this country …  you raised a million dollars through [K]ickstarter. That’s a lot of money. And the best you can do is come up with a scheme to take advantage of desperate musicians by reinforcing everything that’s wrong with the music business and the modern American economy?

Some said her request was so tone-deaf she must have written it on purpose to provoke the controversy.

Palmer did have her defenders among the commenters, one of whom pointed out that the Kickstarter campaign funded her new CD, not the tour per se. Others praised her for playing free concerts including for the Occupy Movement.

But the issue of wangling free or really cheap labor goes way beyond music. Unpaid internships in businesses of all types; the rise of user-generated content in media; and crowdsourcing across the board are all part of the same bigger picture.

And pushback as evidenced by the Palmer comments is likewise growing. For example,  Ryan Carson, founder and CEO Of Treehouse, assailed hackathon promoters for treating programmers as trained monkeys. If you doubt that this is a touchy subject just try asking an artist what she thinks about  99designs or a reporter about Journatic. Then duck.

As GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram pointed out in his post about Journatic, it’s important to maintain professional standards — including pay — but it’s also important to face facts — and the facts are that crowdsourcing, in some form, is a now a reality.

Feature photo courtesy of  Flickr user Zawezome

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Apparently, he’s not the only UK-based entrepreneur with a fast-growing company and a remote team across the pond. Ryan Carson, the founder of coding tutorial site Treehouse, recently took to his blog to explain how he manages his widely dispersed team of 40, including a main office in Orlando and remote workers across America, from his home in Britain.

And this dispersed structure seems to be working for him. “I’ve managed the company for almost two years from another country with up to an eight hour time difference. We’re doing $3,000,000+ in revenue with over 11,000 paying customers and growing fast, so we must be doing something right,” he writes, before offering the following tips on how he makes it work:

Outsource HR. We use TriNet to do all of our HR (payroll, insurance, employment taxes and pension contributions). If I had to administer this, there’s no way I could’ve scaled the Team remotely this quickly or effectively.

Don’t do your HR in-house. There are a ton of legal requirements and logistical details to make sure you take care of your Team properly and it’s a huge time suck. TriNet costs roughly $100 per person, per month and it’s worth every penny. The UX on their web portal is terrible, but it’s very powerful and has all the functionality you need.

Hire a Financial Controller / Office Manager. We hired Rich Pettit as our Financial Controller and Office Manager. I sit 4,247 miles from our office in Orlando, and there’s no way I could run the company without a reliable and hardworking Team Member looking after the day-to-day operations.

A lot of you will think you can’t afford this person early on, and you’d be right. Don’t hire this person until you are comfortable from a cash-flow perspective. But as soon as you can, hire this person. I think Mark Suster is really smart (which is why I invited him to invest in Treehouse and thankfully he did) and he agrees.

Use Campfire for company chat. When you’re separated physically you need a place to hang out and talk about random stuff or ideas. We use Campfire and it works great. We have a bunch of different rooms setup like: Chiggity Chillin (company wide hangout), Product Team, Dev Team, Firehose (commits to the Treehouse GitHub repo and deploys to Production).

Organize visually. We’re now using Trello for all our company projects. We switched from Asana because Trello is more visual and it’s a little easier to see how things are progressing. They’re both great tools – we just found the left-to-right kanban-style layout of Trello very easy to parse quickly. Each card is an atomic to-do and you can see it moving through various stages to completion. Above is a screenshot of our actual “Product Team: In Progress” Trello board.

For more tips and Carson’s generally interesting thoughts on start-up life, check out his blog.

Do all of Carson’s tips make sense to you? 

Image courtesy of Flickr user Christian Haugen. 

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According to him, they’re run by opportunists looking to cash in on the eagerness of young talent for their own purposes:

The problem is that articles like This City Never Sleeps, and Neither do the Hackers and job posts that mention hacker mansions are starting to appear everywhere.

It’s a joke and I’m tired of it. Developers aren’t monkeys in a cage who can’t wait to do the next “hackathon”. They’ve got families, bills to pay and every other pressure that normal people do. They don’t want to drink Red Bull all night and sleep under their desks.

Next time someone asks if you want to crash at their hacker mansion for the summer (which has a ppol, BBQ and pool table!) or team up for a 24-hour hackathon, think twice. They’re probably just trying to cash in on your youth and optimism.

Does he have a point?

I’ve certainly seen the number of them multiply massively over the past few years, which means the quality and intent now varies wildly. Some are good, some are bad. But the general underlying cultural trend definitely seems to be there — the idea that you can (and should) convince a few hackers to develop things in their spare time using a mixture of Red Bull, pizza and some vague dream about building The Next Big Thing.

Sometimes these are great community events that bring people together to do fun stuff; sometimes they feel exploitative — and involvement can certainly be tricky for those who don’t want to buy into macho coder culture.

Over on Hacker News the post has generated some pushback (as you might expect, given that it’s a hangout for people who generally subscribe to this sort of ethos). Butit’s important, of course, to remember that there is no concerted effort here to undermine, and plenty of people happily engage in hack events of all stripes. There is no great Hackathon Authority arranging all of these events, depriving ordinary working stiffs of their weekends. It is simply a confluence of different people all seeing benefits in the same thing.

Is it just a case of calling out the bad seeds?

Photograph of Ryan Carson used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user jeffkward

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