The future of Crowd Work

“Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate?”

This weeks paper by A Kittur et al [1] proposes a new framework that would empower future crowd workers (those solving the problem) and requesters (those proposing the problem) to enable a “positive future of crowd work” [1] that we would be happy for our children to participate in. This is achieved through qualitative analysis of current literature and interactions with current crowd workers through surveys to identify common goals and research areas.

The authors draw on theory within distributed computing to identify and solve the weaknesses of the current crowd sourcing methods. The framework proposed is split into twelve research foci, which is further sub-divided into three categories: processes, computation, and workers. Each sub-section consistently identifies the goals, related work, and research required in each area for the framework to succeed, and poses a “call for action” [1] for other researchers to address.

Although I can see the benefits of improving crowd sourcing for both workers and requesters, several of the proposed “next steps” in this paper appear unrealistic as they negatively affect the current benefits of crowd sourcing: cheap, fast, and distributed tasks. The proposed framework adds complexity that would take these benefits away, for example, the time it takes workers to understand a complex problem poses several questions. Would they be paid for their time? If they are not, then are they likely to work on complex problems, when they could spend their time solving simpler tasks and earning money.

Overall, the framework provides improvements for the current crowd sourcing platforms, such as distribution of tasks, or specific use of artificial intelligence to automatically guide selection and assignment of tasks to workers. Aspects of the framework breakdown in some areas as they steer the direction of crowd sourcing to an unknown job role. The paper raised a lot of thought and questions for me about the state of workers: is crowd sourcing meant to supplement a current job, or be a full time job itself?

[1] A Kittur et al. “The future of Crowd Work”. 2013.

The paper I chose this week is: “A Classroom Study of Using Crowd Feedback in the Iterative Design Process” by A Ku in 2015, which illustrates crowd sourcing to iteratively improve the design of a system, which puts into practice what Kittur discusses, but does not extend the theoretical foundations they proposed.