Ethics and tactics of professional crowdwork

Abstract

Paid crowd workers are not just an API call---but all too often, they are treated like one.

Relationship-Based Business Process Crowdsourcing?

“…Much of the research focuses on (minimum) incentive schemes, how to deal with bad work and spammers and so on. Whilst not denying these are important issues, crowdsourcing tools tend to be somewhat biased towards the needs of the enterprise often to the detriment of the worker [3]. However, as with outsourcing we do not believe that crowdsourcing is necessarily a negative work model, it can just appear that way because, with some notable exceptions [e.g.…”

“…with a known correct output) throughout the task can be used to both judge worker quality (and weed out spammers) and provide feedback enabling genuine workers to improve. Whilst AMT provides means to rate workers' reputations, there is no equivalent means in the tool itself of rating work requesters [3,11] despite the problem of unscrupulous requesters being well known. To compound this inequality, workers' reputations are harmed if work requesters reject their work.…”

“…Unfortunately much of the research into pay is based on experimental studies rather than real tasks and thus it is hard to really understand how pay impacts performance and indeed take up of jobs in real crowdsourcing work. Certainly from the worker's side, as with employees in any workforce, there is concern about getting fair pay for the work done [3], especially given that very low wages are rife [3,11,12]. When we take into account that not only does completion time vary but some tasks never get completed on AMT [19], we can see why some requesters have rejected AMT in favour of other models of working such as ODesk 10 -an online market for contract labour.…”

“…For the outsourcer, profits are achieved not only through economies of scale, but also through deskilling and offshoring. This is not inherently negative, since for example BPO has had a positive impact on the Indian economy 3 , providing much needed employment and propelling infrastructure development. However, it is not a completely rosy picture either, with an frequently undervalued workforce doing low skilled work.…”

“…In addition it also demonstrates how a more relationship-based approach to crowdsourcing is likely to be as beneficial to the organization requesting the work as it is to the worker. The concept of relationship-based crowdsourcing has been introduced by [3] as part of a call to take the workers perspective in crowdsourcing. Whilst we might hope that all enterprises would aim to treat their workers fairly, in practice this is more likely when they can see a clear benefit in their day-to-day activities.…”