Hello everyone.
Welcome to the presentation of our paper entitled An Examination of the Work Practice of Crowdfarms.
So the general background of our study is that
there are more and more large and complex macro tasks on the crowdsourcing market.
Crowdsourcing platforms then start to support crowd workers functioning in teams.
In China, there is a similar type of such workforce.
They are companies farming work out in the crowdsourcing context and we call them crowdfarms
However, little do we know about their work practice
So we conducted semi-structured telephone interviews with 53 participants
from Zhubajie (ZBJ) platform
and we asked questions revolving around five aspects as you may tell from the page
Here is a table summarizing our findings in the study
However, due to the time limitation, I would like to just mention some of the interesting findings.
For example, different from the previous studies, which mainly focused on the macro task
we found that microtasks, such as logo and slogan creation,
are also important for these professional crowdfarms
For the most part, they use these tasks to fill the profit vacuum between macro tasks
and some of them would also use the smaller tasks to train their new employees
so that they can participate in larger and more complex cowdwork in the future
If you are interested in this topic please check out our paper for more information
In the discussion section, we first talked about every specific finding in terms of
the task procurements, execution, and reputation management in crowdfunds.
Again you are very welcome to check them out in the paper.
After that, we've discussed more in depth regarding the impact that crowdfarms have
on solo crowdworkers, requesters, and crowdsourcing platforms.
So, for solo crowd workers, the participation of crowdfarm
is more like a double-edged sword. On one hand, crowdfarms could rely on their
advantages in teamwork and professionalism to take on as many tasks as possible,
which leaves solo crowdworkers at a disadvantage with the competition from specialized companies.
On the other hand, the subcontracted tasks from crowdfarm provide solo
crowdworkers with opportunities to take part in more advanced macrotasks.
With the different skills and
experience obtained in this process, they could better develop their careers in crowdwork.
For requesters, crowdfarm is an efficient and professional one-stop option
so the requesters do not have to decompose the work by themselves or communicate with multiple
solo crowdworkers, which significantly increases the work efficiency and saves lots of time.
However, a risk for requester is that the subcontracting behavior of crowdfarm
may lead to unknown third party performing their tasks,
increasing uncertainty about the quality of the final submission.
For platforms, crowdfarm provides the opportunity to expand
macrotasks crowdsourcing, which will attract more enterprises and individuals to post
a wider variety of tasks and, therefore, increase the revenue of these platforms.
But it should also be noted that the emergence of
crowdfarms challenges the operation and management of the crowdsourcing platform.
For example, an obvious challenge is that how could the platform manage secondary markets,
in which crowdfarm at least partially controls the price of the subcontracted task.
To sum up, our study is the most detailed examination
of crowdfarm to date with several design implications derived from novel findings.
Also, we would like to suggest some further questions for future study.
For example well these relatively small crowdfarms grow and focus entirely on online work?
Will they adopt more practices of traditional organizations?
Will they be affected by the shift to more remote business interaction that
some anticipate as a result of COVID-19?
Thank you!