Platform Labour and the Mobile Underclass: Barriers to Participation in the United States and India

Online crowdwork platforms have been praised as powerful vehicles for economic development, particularly for workers traditionally excluded from the labor market. However, there has been insufficient scrutiny as to the feasibility of crowdwork as an income-source among socio-economically deprived populations. This paper examines device requirements and differential access to digital infrastructure, both of which act as potential barriers to not only basic participation but also to economic success. Given the increasing prevalence of mobile-first and mobile-only populations, research on this topic aids in understanding the crowdwork ecosystem among differing socio-economic sectors. Based on a survey of 606 crowd workers in the United States and India, this paper uses both quantitative and qualitative data to explore whether reliance on mobile devices is detrimental for the economic outcomes of crowdwork. The results point to substantial inequalities in device use and received benefits from crowdwork, within each country and between the two contexts

TurkScanner: Predicting the Hourly Wage of Microtasks

Workers in crowd markets struggle to earn a living. One reason for this is that it is difficult for workers to accurately gauge the hourly wages of microtasks, and they consequently end up performing labor with little pay. In general, workers are provided with little information about tasks, and are left to rely on noisy signals, such as textual description of the task or rating of the requester. This study explores various computational methods for predicting the working times (and thus hourly wages) required for tasks based on data collected from other workers completing crowd work. We provide the following contributions. (i) A data collection method for gathering real-world training data on crowd-work tasks and the times required for workers to complete them; (ii) TurkScanner: a machine learning approach that predicts the necessary working time to complete a task (and can thus implicitly provide the expected hourly wage). We collected 9,155 data records using a web browser extension installed by 84 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, and explored the challenge of accurately recording working times both automatically and by asking workers. TurkScanner was created using ~150 derived features, and was able to predict the hourly wages of 69.6% of all the tested microtasks within a 75% error. Directions for future research include observing the effects of tools on people's working practices, adapting this approach to a requester tool for better price setting, and predicting other elements of work (e.g., the acceptance likelihood and worker task preferences.)Comment: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on World Wide Web (WWW '19), San Francisco, CA, USA, May 13-17, 201

Understanding motivators and challenges in accessibility development

We analyzed secondary data from nine studies including a total of 1962 respondents on what motivates web practitioners such as user experience developers, web designers, and web masters’ intention to promote accessibility, and what challenges they encounter during accessibility development. In this exploratory study, we adopt the viewpoint of motivation and challenges and aim to study them from intrinsic and extrinsic viewpoints. We then interpreted intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and intrinsic and extrinsic challenges that should be addressed in the management of accessibility work so that the main accessibility milestones become implemented in the design of information technology artifacts. We retrieved recommendations for top management and superiors to gain and support practitioners’ motivation and to address challenges in accessibility development to avoid ethical conflict in accessibility development. These findings strengthen an understanding of possible ethical conflicts in accessibility development and help to act responsibly in the accessibility development of information systems.© 2023 Association for Information Systems.fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

UNDERSTANDING MOTIVATORS AND CHALLENGES IN ACCESSIBILITY DEVELOPMENT

We analyzed secondary data from nine studies including a total of 1962 respondents on what motivates web practitioners such as user experience developers, web designers, and web masters’ intention to promote accessibility, and what challenges they encounter during accessibility development. In this ex-ploratory study, we adopt the viewpoint of motivation and challenges and aim to study them from in-trinsic and extrinsic viewpoints. We then interpreted intrinsic and extrinsic motivators and intrinsic and extrinsic challenges that should be addressed in the management of accessibility work so that the main accessibility milestones become implemented in the design of information technology artifacts. We re-trieved recommendations for top management and superiors to gain and support practitioners’ motiva-tion and to address challenges in accessibility development to avoid ethical conflict in accessibility development. These findings strengthen an understanding of possible ethical conflicts in accessibility development and help to act responsibly in the accessibility development of information systems

The Impact of Motivation Factors on Employees performance in Tanzania in Public Sector: A Case of NSSF.

ABSTRACT Employee motivation is a major challenge in many public organizations. The performance of a public organization depends on the knowledge, skills, and motivation of individual employees. This study focused on the National Social Security Fund (NSSF) in Tanzania mainland. It comprises three specific objectives such as determining motivation factors that affect employees performance, determine the impact of negative motivational factors on employees performance, and suggest measures for improving employees performance. The case study design was used at the collection of the information at one specific point in times. The questionnaires were used to collect data from the sample size 45 middle staffs’ employees at NSSF and interview guide were collected data from five management staffs. The findings showed that the salary increase is a focal point of NSSF monetary motivation towards job performance. The impact of negative motivational factors on job performance is related on the feeling underpaid, employee payment. The fair satisfaction of job increases the motivation of employees at NSSF. The most effective plan to motivate employees related to the desire and willingness of individual employees. Good working environment as a motivation factors towards the improvement of employees performance. The increase in salary and allowances motivate job performance. The motivation factor connected to the provision of a certificate of appreciation. The appropriate motivation is needed on the ground of organizational policy. The motivation system needs to be well conceptualized and implemented to the employees’ performance of an organization. Management must recommend to the government to prepare a good system for motivation towards. Keywords: Employee, Motivation, Performance, Public Sector

The Challenges of Crowd Workers in Rural and Urban America

Crowd work has the potential of helping the financial recovery of regions traditionally plagued by a lack of economic opportunities, e.g., rural areas. However, we currently have limited information about the challenges facing crowd work-ers from rural and super rural areas as they struggle to make a living through crowd work sites. This paper examines the challenges and advantages of rural and super rural AmazonMechanical Turk (MTurk) crowd workers and contrasts them with those of workers from urban areas. Based on a survey of421 crowd workers from differing geographic regions in theU.S., we identified how across regions, people struggled with being onboarded into crowd work. We uncovered that despite the inequalities and barriers, rural workers tended to be striving more in micro-tasking than their urban counterparts. We also identified cultural traits, relating to time dimension and individualism, that offer us an insight into crowd workers and the necessary qualities for them to succeed on gig platforms. We finish by providing design implications based on our findings to create more inclusive crowd work platforms and tool

Characterizing the Global Crowd Workforce: A Cross-Country Comparison of Crowdworker Demographics

Micro-task crowdsourcing is an international phenomenon that has emerged during the past decade. This paper sets out to explore the characteristics of the international crowd workforce and provides a cross-national comparison of the crowd workforce in ten countries. We provide an analysis and comparison of demographic characteristics and shed light on the significance of micro-task income for workers in different countries. This study is the first large-scale country-level analysis of the characteristics of workers on the platform Figure Eight (formerly CrowdFlower), one of the two platforms dominating the micro-task market. We find large differences between the characteristics of the crowd workforces of different countries, both regarding demography and regarding the importance of micro-task income for workers. Furthermore, we find that the composition of the workforce in the ten countries was largely stable across samples taken at different points in time