An Examination of the Work Practices of Crowdfarms

Wang, Yihong; Papangelis, Konstantinos; Saker, Michel; Lykourentzou, Ioanna; Khan, Vassilis-Javed; Chamberlain, Alan; Grudin, Jonathan

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is a new value creation business model. Annual revenue of the Chinese market alone is hundreds of millions of dollars, yet few studies have focused on the practices of the Chinese crowdsourcing workforce, and those that do mainly focus on solo crowdworkers. We have extended our study of solo crowdworker practices to include crowdfarms, a relatively new entry to the gig economy: small companies that carry out crowdwork as a key part of their business. We report here on interviews of people who work in 53 crowdfarms. We describe how crowdfarms procure jobs, carry out macrotasks and microtasks, manage their reputation, and employ different management practices to motivate crowdworkers and customers.

Citation

Wang, Y., Papangelis, K., Saker, M., Lykourentzou, I., Khan, V.-J., Chamberlain, A., & Grudin, J. (2021, May). An Examination of the Work Practices of Crowdfarms. Presented at CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Yokohama, Japan (online)

• Presentation Conference Type: Edited Proceedings
• Conference Name: CHI '21: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• Start Date: May 8, 2021
• End Date: May 13, 2021
• Acceptance Date: Dec 12, 2020
• Online Publication Date: May 7, 2021
• Publication Date: May 7, 2021
• Deposit Date: Jul 15, 2023
• Publisher: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Article Number: 139
• Book Title: CHI '21: Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
• ISBN: 9781450380966
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445603
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/23005831
• Publisher URL: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411764.3445603