Fortifying the Algorithmic Management Provisions in the Proposed Platform Work Directive

The European Commission proposed a Directive on Platform Work at the end of 2021. While much attention has been placed on its effort to address misclassification of the employed as self-employed, it also contains ambitious provisions for the regulation of the algorithmic management prevalent on these platforms. Overall, these provisions are well-drafted, yet they require extra scrutiny in light of the fierce lobbying and resistance they will likely encounter in the legislative process, in implementation and in enforcement. In this article, we place the proposal in its sociotechnical context, drawing upon wide cross-disciplinary scholarship to identify a range of tensions, potential misinterpretations, and perversions that should be pre-empted and guarded against at the earliest possible stage. These include improvements to ex ante and ex post algorithmic transparency; identifying and strengthening the standard against which human reviewers of algorithmic decisions review; anticipating challenges of representation and organising in complex platform contexts; creating realistic ambitions for digital worker communication channels; and accountably monitoring and evaluating impacts on workers while limiting data collection. We encourage legislators and regulators at both European and national levels to act to fortify these provisions in the negotiation of the Directive, its potential transposition, and in its enforcement

Reputation Agent: Prompting Fair Reviews in Gig Markets

Our study presents a new tool, Reputation Agent, to promote fairer reviews from requesters (employers or customers) on gig markets. Unfair reviews, created when requesters consider factors outside of a worker's control, are known to plague gig workers and can result in lost job opportunities and even termination from the marketplace. Our tool leverages machine learning to implement an intelligent interface that: (1) uses deep learning to automatically detect when an individual has included unfair factors into her review (factors outside the worker's control per the policies of the market); and (2) prompts the individual to reconsider her review if she has incorporated unfair factors. To study the effectiveness of Reputation Agent, we conducted a controlled experiment over different gig markets. Our experiment illustrates that across markets, Reputation Agent, in contrast with traditional approaches, motivates requesters to review gig workers' performance more fairly. We discuss how tools that bring more transparency to employers about the policies of a gig market can help build empathy thus resulting in reasoned discussions around potential injustices towards workers generated by these interfaces. Our vision is that with tools that promote truth and transparency we can bring fairer treatment to gig workers.Comment: 12 pages, 5 figures, The Web Conference 2020, ACM WWW 202

The Fairwork Foundation: Strategies for improving platform work in a global context

This paper introduces the Fairwork Foundation, a research initiative that is also developing an intervention around the quality of work on digital labour platforms. Lacking the ability to collectively bargain, many platform workers have little ability to negotiate wages or working conditions with their employers. As a result of this new, digitally-managed market for work, many workers have jobs characterised by long and irregular hours, low income, and high stress. Fairwork's field research across India and South Africa finds challenges for workers across a range of issues which form the basis for a set of decent work principles on: pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation. The results of the field research are being used to rank and compare platforms against these principles as a means to encourage decent, and discourage ‘un-decent’ platform work

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Crowdsourcing in China: Exploring the Work Experience of Solo Crowdworkers and Crowdfarm Workers

Recent research highlights the potential of crowdsourcing in China. Yet very few studies explore the workplace context and experiences of Chinese crowdworkers. Those that do, focus mainly on the work experiences of solo crowdworkers but do not deal with issues pertaining to the substantial amount of people working in ‘crowdfarms’. This article addresses this gap as one of its primary concerns. Drawing on a study that involves 48 participants, our research explores, compares and contrasts the work experiences of solo crowdworkers to those of crowdfarm workers. Our findings illustrate that the work experiences and context of the solo workers and crowdfarm workers are substantially different, with regards to their motivations, the ways they engage with crowdsourcing, the tasks they work on, and the crowdsourcing platforms they utilize. Overall, our study contributes to furthering the understandings on the work experiences of crowdworkers in China

ICT4S 2029: What Will Be The Systems Supporting Sustainability in 15 Years

Research is often inspired by visions of the future. These visions can take on various narrative forms, and can fall anywhere along the spectrum from utopian to dystopian. Even though we recognize the importance of such visions to help us shape research questions and inspire rich design spaces to be explored, the opportunity to discuss them is rarely given in a research context. Imagine how civilization will have changed in 15 years. What is your vision for systems that will be supporting sustainability in that time Which transformational changes will have occurred in the mean time that allow for these systems Is ICT even the right tool or does it contradict sustainability by making our world ever more complex How can we make systems and our societies more sustainable and resilient by ICT4S This paper presents a compilation of fictional abstracts for inspiration and discussion, and provides means to stimulate discussion on future research and contributes to ICT4S community building