Kittur, et al – 2013 – The future of crowd work

Summary: Classic CSCW paper that proposed a new framework to address crowd work management challenges. Kittur et al’s model incorporates 12 focus areas within 3 primary topic areas:

Crowd work processes: Workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, realtime crowd work, synchronous collaboration. quality control

Crowd computation: Crowds guiding AI, AIs guiding crowds, crowdsourcing platforms

Crowd worker future: Job design, reputation/credentials, motivation/rewards

Synthesis: I’m especially interested in the concept of synchronous collaboration as a way to explore sociotemporality in distributed work teams in real time. While largely unexplored in the paper, the approach supports both structured and unstructured collaborative projects in a temporal context which could be a helpful frame for my digital humanitarian time study.

A related concern for my work is on the quality of crowd work — both in terms of output and the crowd process, itself. This process improvement idea has some interesting design implications for improving temporal qualities of SBTF data:

• How is the volunteer thinking about time?
• Where does temporality enter into the data collection workflow?
• What metadata do they rely on?
• What is their temporal sensemaking approach?

Foundational concepts in this study: crowd work, collective intelligence, crowdsourcing

Agreement in related work: asdf

Contested areas: In the literature, quality tends to be used as an attribute of the output (content, HIT, etc.) but could/should it also refer to the crowd worker experience, as Kittur notes: “job satisfaction, direction-setting, coordination, and quality control”?

Gaps/Limits in this study: asdf

Connections to my work: social coordination, crowdsourcing, collective intelligence,

Annotated paper:

Kittur et al. – 2013 – The future of crowd work

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