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The Crowd is a Collaborative Network

Published: 27 February 2016 Publication History
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  • Abstract

    The main goal of this paper is to show that crowdworkers collaborate to fulfill technical and social needs left by the platform they work on. That is, crowdworkers are not the independent, autonomous workers they are often assumed to be, but instead work within a social network of other crowdworkers. Crowdworkers collaborate with members of their networks to 1) manage the administrative overhead associated with crowdwork, 2) find lucrative tasks and reputable employers and 3) recreate the social connections and support often associated with brick and mortar-work environments. Our evidence combines ethnography, interviews, survey data and larger scale data analysis from four crowdsourcing platforms, emphasizing the qualitative data from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform and Microsoft's proprietary crowdsourcing platform, the Universal Human Relevance System (UHRS). This paper draws from an ongoing, longitudinal study of Crowdwork that uses a mixed methods approach to understand the cultural meaning, political implications, and ethical demands of crowdsourcing.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CSCW '16: Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing
    February 2016
    1866 pages
    ISBN:9781450335928
    DOI:10.1145/2818048
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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    Publication History

    Published: 27 February 2016

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    Author Tags

    1. collaboration
    2. crowdsourcing
    3. online labor
    4. social networks

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    CSCW '16: Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
    February 27 - March 2, 2016
    California, San Francisco, USA

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    CSCW '16 Paper Acceptance Rate 142 of 571 submissions, 25%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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    • (2024)"Are we all in the same boat?" Customizable and Evolving Avatars to Improve Worker Engagement and Foster a Sense of Community in Online Crowd WorkProceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642429(1-26)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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