[Air-L] CfP: CSCW workshop: Toward a typology of participation in crowdsourcing

[Tanja Aitamurto]

Dear AoIR colleagues and friends,
If you are fascinated by geekying about crowdsourcing, you might want to
consider this. We are arranging a workshop at CSCW in San Francisco in
February for developing a typology of participation in crowdsourcing.
Papers are due December 7th. Please let us know if you have questions, and
we hope to see you in San Francisco!

*Call for papers*
CSCW2016 workshop, February 28

*Toward a typology of participation in crowd work*
Deadline for paper submissions December 7
http://ttpcw.blogs.dsv.su.se/

The development of  technologies and practices of broad public
participation are changing the notion of the public. As the use of
participatory and social media has become widespread in society and enabled
a more collaborative information production, the potential for a
transformation of production relations through crowd-based activities
affect many aspects of life. There are new potentials for transformative
developments in government, work life, science, and emergency response.
However, these new platforms for participation have not solved many of the
pre-crowd problems regarding participation, such as lack of
representativeness and flawed deliberative processes. Therefore it is
important and relevant to look at the power relations within crowd
production and to examine how different tools handle participatory
processes in the crowd.

This workshop examines different types of participatory process, in crowd
work such as crowdsourced policymaking, crisis management, citizen science
and paid crowd work, among other, focusing on relations and power dynamics
within and beyond the crowds. We welcome researchers from a diversity of
disciplines and perspectives to formulate a typology of participation in
crowd work.

*Typologies of participation*
In the wider field of participation, in areas like participatory planning,
design or participatory research, the power relations in the participatory
setting are seen as central for the outcome of the participation.
However, we haven’t seen a more structured overview of typologies of
participation indicating levels of power and agency in the context of
crowdwork. For this workshop, we therefore invite participants to look more
closely at different types of participation within crowdwork, and at
different levels of interaction. Possible sites of analysis could be the
interaction between crowd workers, the participation in the work by
different stakeholders, the potentially privileged levels of interaction
with the data, or tensions in the agency of the crowdworkers in relation to
the task.
What types of ontologies exist in different types of crowdsourcing
contexts, and how do these ontologies reflect one or more epistemologies?
How is this  expressed in the relations between the crowd and the sourcer,
or in how different interfaces and tools support different roles and
different modes of crowd participation? What are the relations between
different attitudes towards knowledge and the social relations in the
crowdsourcing process? What are the implications for power relations
between different modes of participation?
If we learn more about how participation in crowd work can be described in
terms of power and relations, we might get a better understanding of how
participation can be articulated, how different tools for crowd
participation can be developed, and how the different perspectives and
stakes in crowd work might be harmonized, or at least clarified.

*Suggested subthemes and topics *

Controlling economic structures in crowd work
• Controlling levels of;  access; transparency, secrecy, closeness,
connectedness, alienation
• Relation between crowd work control dynamics and power relationships
outside the technology framework.
• Differentiations in entry and exit points to the platform

Intersecting belief systems in crowd work
• Norms about crowds, collaboration and democracy
• Balance between exclusive groups and democratic publics
• Stakeholders’ different cultural assumptions
• Tensions between individual scoring systems and collective sharing
processes

Community support in crowd work
• Communication needs within the crowd
• Available avenues of communication to support community
• Apprenticeship models
• Relations between the crowd and the “sourcers”
• Navigating intersecting communities in crowd setting
• Relations between different types of  stakeholders in the crowd setting

Going from crowd to public
• Publics as performative states; co-constitution an interdependence
• Ethics and power relations in crowd sourced research
• The power relations between the designer/inventor and the crowd
• Quantified selves, data sources or co-researchers

*Workshop activities*
This one-day workshop will explore the topics in mini presentations and
brainstorming sessions. The objective with the workshop is to develop a
typology of participation in crowd work based on an overview of the field.
Furthermore,  selected contributions from the workshop will be considered
for a special issue in a HCI journal.

*Submission *
Participants are selected based on their submitted position-papers.
The maximum length of a paper is 2,000 words.

Deadline for submissions is *December 07.*

Send submissions and inquiries to: crowdtypologies at gmail.com

*Organization*
The workshop builds on four earlier successful workshops: Back to the Future
of Organizational Work: Crowdsourcing Digital Work Marketplaces, Structures
for Knowledge Co-creation between Organizations and the Public hosted at
ACM CSCW 2014, The Morphing Organization – Rethinking Groupwork Systems in
the Era of Crowdwork hosted at ACM GROUP 2014, and Examining the Essence of
the Crowds: Motivations, Roles and Identities at ECSCW 2015. (2)

This workshop is organized by:
Karin Hansson PhD, the Department of Computer & Systems Sciences at
Stockholm University.
Michael Muller, PhD, the Cognitive User Experience group of IBM Research,
Cambridge MA USA
Tanja Aitamurto, PhD, Deputy Director of the Brown Institute for Media
Innovation at the School of Engineering at Stanford University.
Ann Light, Professor of Design and Creative Technology at the University of
Sussex and leader of the Creative Technology Group.
Athanasios Mazarakis, PhD, Web Science at Kiel University.
Neha Gupta, PhD student at the School of Computer Science, University of
Nottingham, UK.
Thomas Ludwig, Ph.D. student at the Institute for Information Systems at
the University of Siegen, Germany.

Dr. Tanja Aitamurto
Deputy Director
Brown Fellow, postdoctoral
The Brown Institute for Media Innovation <http://brown.stanford.edu/>
School of Engineering
Stanford
www.tanjaaitamurto.com <http://brokenfence.flavors.me/>
~ examining collective intelligence in journalism, governance and design ~