Reading: Aniket Kittur, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael Bernstein, Elizabeth Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John Zimmerman, Matt Lease, and John Horton. 2013. The Future of Crowd Work. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW ’13), 1301–1318. https://doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441923
What can we do to make crowd work better than the current state of simple tasks, to allow more complexity and satisfaction for the workers? The paper tries to provide a framework to improve crowd work in that direction. It does this through framing it in terms of 12 research directions that need to be studied so that they can be improved upon. The research foci are envisioned to promote the betterment of the current, less than stellar, sometimes exploitative nature of crowd work and make it into something “we would want our children to participate” in.
I like their parallels to distributed computing because it really is like that, trying to coordinate a bunch of people to complete some larger task by combining the results of smaller tasks. I work on distributed things so I appreciate the parallel they make because it fits my mental framework. I also find it interesting that one of the ways of quality control is to observe the worker’s process rather than just evaluating the output but it makes sense that evaluating the process allows the requester to maybe give guidance on what the worker is doing wrong and help improve the processes, whereas with just looking at the output, you can’t know where things went wrong and can only guess. I also think that their suggestion that crowd workers can move up to be full employees as somewhat dangerous because it seems to incentivize the wrong things for companies. I’m imagining a scenario where a company is built entirely on utilizing high level crowd work where they’re advertising that you have opportunities to “move up”, “make your own hours”, “hustle will reach the top”, where the reward is job security. I realize I just described what tenure track may be like for an academic. But that kind of incentive structure seems exploitative and wrong to me. This kind of set up seems normal because it may have existed for a long time in academia and prospective professors accept it because they are single mindedly determined (and somewhat insane) that they are willing to see this through. But I would hate for something like that to become the norm everywhere else.
- Did anyone feel like there was any avenue that wasn’t addressed? Or did the 12 research foci fully cover every aspect of potential crowd work research?
- Do you think the idea of moving up to employee status on crowd work platforms as a reward for doing a lot of good work is a good idea?
- What kind of off-beat innovations can we think of for new kinds of crowd platforms? Just as a random example – a platform for crowds to work with other crowds, like one crowd assigns tasks for another crowd and they go back and forth.
“Do you think the idea of moving up to employee status on crowd work platforms as a reward for doing a lot of good work is a good idea?”
I feel that the goal here is to motivate workers to deliver high-quality work. As mentioned in the paper, before building any form of career ladders, worker motivations need to be studied to help develop better job designs. For the proposed design to work, the workers need to be able to relate to them and adopt them. For some, gaining the status of an employee within the crowd work platform could be an aspiration since they view it as a “promotion” or recognition of their hard work. Others, as you mentioned, might feel that it is exploitative and may deem it unnecessary. Hence, before adopting any such system, I feel that there needs to be a thorough study conducted in order to understand the sentiments of the worker community as a whole.