Mechanical Turk! I never heard of this term before but I did some research and found this is big. It involves lots of people and even Amazon uses it.
You can gather more info about Turk online.
Why GEM is a novel project?
It is solving a real life problem. It is cutting the middleman, so the Turks will get paid more. It reduces consensus by redundancy. What does this mean? In simple words it reduces the need of doing same thing time and again just to get the average the result.
This could be a life changing move for turks and even for the requestors. Requestors will pay less as there is no middle man and turks will get paid more as there is no middle man. That's the beauty of blockchain - no need of middleman.
The official website is https://gems.org/.
For white-listing you got to be involved in community. It's one step ahead of Proof Of Care which i like as it makes this project whale-proof.
NOTE: I am not a financial adviser. No one should make his decisions based on my perspective