A workshop at CSCW2016, San Fransisco February 27–March 2, 2016.
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 interesting 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.
Deadline for submissions is December 7
Participants are selected based on their submitted position-papers. The maximum length of a paper is 2,000 words. Submissions and inquiries shall be sent to the following email address: crowdtypologies@gmail.com
Suggested sub-themes and topics
Controlling economic structures in crowdwork:
- Controlling levels of; access; transparency, secrecy, closeness, connectedness, alienation
- Relation between control dynamics and power relationships outside the technology framework
- Differentiations in entry/exit points to the platform
Intersecting belief systems in crowdwork - Norms about crowds, collaboration and democracy
- Balance between exclusive groups and open publics
- Stakeholders’ different cultural assumptions
- Tensions between individual scoring systems and collective sharing processes
Community support in crowdwork:
- Communication needs within the crowd
- 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 research
- The power relations between the designer/inventor and the crowd
- Quantified selves, data sources or co-researchers