[Air-L] Second call for CSCW2016 workshop: Toward a typology of participation in crowd work

[Karin Hansson]

Second 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/ <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 <mailto: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.

More information about the workshop and the organizers can be found on the website: http://ttpcw.blogs.dsv.su.se/ <http://ttpcw.blogs.dsv.su.se/>