Hi everyone!
Thank you all for joining this virtual talk.
My name is Joon Park, I am a PhD student in the Computer Science Department at Stanford.
And today, I will be presenting our work on Power Dynamics and Value Conflicts in Designing
and Maintaining Socio-Technical Algorithmic Processes, with my mentors and collaborators,
Karrie Karahalios, Niloufar Salehi, and Motahhare Eslami.
I’ll note that though I’m the one presenting today, this really was a collective effort
amongst all authors, and especially Motahhare, who really, jointly led this project.
Algorithmic processes today make critical decisions in a wide array of contexts.
And in response, we’ve seen a lot of effort put in to make the algorithmic processes align
with the values of the community they serve.
And in the CSCW literature, some of the exciting progress on this front has come in the forms
of participatory or value sensitive design that take, what I would consider to be the
community oriented approaches for designing these systems, where we integrate the thoughts
and values of the community members who are affected by these algorithmic processes when
we design them.
Today, I want to build on this literature by focusing on one particular aspect of such
community oriented approaches, that has received less attention in the recent years, which
is that these quote and quote communities often house value conflicts and power dynamics
within them.
And what makes this an interesting aspect to study is that
they often determine the potentials and limitations of participation…
as described in the long literature on participatory designs
So given this, today I want to discuss,
How would participation for designing an algorithmic process
operate in a community with value conflicts and power dynamics?
and How do we disentangle power and decision-making when some stakeholders can overwrite an algorithm’s
decision?
The context of focus in our study is the CSCW Student Volunteer (SV) selection
process, which is a little bit meta for the conference
This process determines who will serve as student volunteers at the conference.
And this is very much a socio-technical algorithmic process where
both the algorithm and human organizers play a role in determining the
final outcome, which is the list of student volunteers.
Our main finding is that the SV selection process operates
in the context of power hierarchy and value conflicts.
And in such context of our study, we found it difficult to reconcile the
stakeholders’ preferences when we sought their participation in the
designing of the SV selection process.
And what we surface along the way are two things that can
help mitigate the challenges brought forth by
these value conflicts and power hierarchy
One is value transparency -- which denotes transparency into why, not how, the
selection process was designed the way it did,
and another is auditable algorithms -- which denotes the use of algorithms whose
outputs can readily be studied by the members of the
community
So for the remainder of this talk, I want to discuss three things.
first, our study context and procedure for this work,
the results, which characterizes the SV selection process as
a socio-technical algorithmic system with value conflicts and power dynamics
and surface stakeholders’ perspectives on how
to mitigate the challenges of such systems
So first, let me set the stage for our study by describing its context.
So as I mentioned, our study looked at the SV selection process for
CSCW -- in particular, the study took place during the 2019
in-person conference
And there are two reasons why we chose this as our study context.
First, we wanted to observe how a community’s value conflicts and power dynamics
interacted with the design of an algorithmic process, and a conference organization
process like this offers a nice set up for such a study.
And another was that the SV selection process is a process
that explicitly combines an algorithmic and human process.
All SV applicants are asked to fill out a survey that asks
questions such as “are you local” and “have you volunteered before…”
And those answers will be scored by an algorithmic system on the application platform whose weights
and parameters are set by the organizers
And the organizers will take a pass through the generated
list and ensure that the SV group is likely to be effective,
yet diverse.
So given this context, we are asking…
How does the members of the community perceive the SV selection process?
And how would they redesign it?
Participants included 24 members of the conference community who occupies a diverse set of roles….
The study procedure included three steps.
We first started with an interview that explored the
participants’ perception of the selection process
Then a design task in which we asked the participants to redesign the SV selection algorithm’s
weights
And finally, an exit discussion in which we explored how our participants might redesign
the selection process more broadly.
And to analyze the results, two members of the research team analyzed
the output of the sessions through interpretive qualitative analysis.
So what do we find?
Let’s break down what we found in more detail.
Participants diverged on what they viewed as desirable,
and non-desirable features of being an SV.
For instance, during the redesigning process of the algorithm,
our participants were asked if the system should prefer
students who are local to the conference site.
10 participants answered yes for reasons such as what
a non-sv participant suggested here: “I think the point of having conferences
in different areas would be to increase accessibility.”
6, however, said no.
For instance, a SV participant mentioned: [The local students] have the
lowest cost for attending this conference.
Meanwhile, the rest suggested that whether the students are
local should not matter…
And from the perspective of an organizer, this was partially because there
was no way of verifying if somebody is actually local
And these sorts of disagreement and diverging views
recurred in many of the questions that the participants were
asked during our study, and in the actual application survey
When the views did not converge, the participants advocated for
value transparency, which is transparency into why a decision was made.
An organizer noted, [...] that most of the stuff we’ve seen
here is to be solved with both and probably more so with the openness
[...] even if they don’t agree with everything
we did, people would probably understand if we clearly
explained why we did it.”
Another SV echoed this: ““What’s important [in the SV selection
process is] the logic behind selection” (SV 8)” (SV
8)
In addition, the power hierarchy within the community,
and the potentials for that to manifest human bias
was widely felt and acknowledged
An organizer note, “People in an already powerful position [..]
could probably ask their friends and their close colleagues.”
Similarly, an SV mentioned “... there is a portion of human bias.”
In response, our participants suggested that an algorithm, if auditable, can be a power-balancer
that can counteract power hierarchy and human biases
An organizer noted…
“The human process actually, probably concerns me a little bit more…
I’m suspect about human biases and how they actually might be
harder and to assess.
”
An SV echoed this sentiment: “I think there should be a maximum amount
of SVs that the organizers can choose to be selected.
So [...] it’s kind of limiting the human power of
overturning their machine or overturning the lottery system.”
And with that, thank you everyone for your time.