City Research Online

Abstract

Crowdsourcing in China is a thriving industry. Among its most interesting structures, we find crowdfarms, in which crowdworkers self-organize as small organizations to tackle macrotasks. Little, however, is known as to which practices these crowdfarms use to tackle the macrotasks, and this goes hand in hand with the current practice of the HCI research community to treat all forms of complex crowdsourcing work as practically the same. However, macrotasks differ substantially regarding structure and decomposability. Treating them under one umbrella term - macrotasking - can lead to an imprecise understanding of the workforce involved. We address this gap by examining the work practices of 31 Chinese crowdfarms on the four main macrotask types, namely: modular, interlaced, wicked, and container macrotasks. Our results confirm essential differences in how these nascent crowd organizations address different macrotasks and shed light on what platforms can do to improve the uptake of such work.

Publication Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Additional Information:	Copyright © 2023 ACM. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in CHI '23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581418
Publisher Keywords:	crowdsourcing, crowdfarms, work practices
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HM Sociology Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs > Sociology & Criminology

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