[AISWorld] HICSS-53 CFP - Crowdsourcing and Digital Workforce in the Gig Economy Minitrack

[Nancy Deng]

2020 Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-53)

January 7-10, 2020, Grand Wailea, Maui, Hawaii, USA

Mini-track: Crowdsourcing and Digital Workforce in the Gig Economy

Track: Internet and the Digital Economy



Scope

Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services and content by soliciting voluntary contributions in the form of an open call from a large network of individuals rather than from an organization’s employees or suppliers. For organizations, crowdsourcing provides an online marketplace, such as Amazon Mechanical Turk and Upwork, to tap into the labor and intelligence of the crowd. This emerging crowdsourcing marketplace is shaped by six essential characteristics, including on-demand virtual labor, open access to work, Internet access to join the crowd, human tasks, modular technical architecture, and three stakeholders of crowdsourcer, crowdsourcee, and crowdsourcing intermediary. During the past decade, scholars from different disciplines have paid increasing attention to the design and development of crowd-based platforms and the intelligence and innovation arising from crowdsourced contests and competitions.



Studies on the technical systems and collective intelligence are informative, but our understanding of the crowdsourcing phenomenon cannot be complete without a comprehensive understanding of the crowd, the work made available on the digital platform, and its institutional, regulatory and societal impacts. More broadly, crowdsourcing contributes to the growth of the gig economy, the labor market characterized by the prevalence of short-term contracts or freelance work as opposed to permanent jobs, enabled by on-demand apps such as Uber and TaskRabbit. Economists estimate that the portion of U.S. workers earning a living as independent contractors, freelancers, temps, and on-call employees jumped from 10% in 2005 to nearly 16% in 2015, and the trend continues to grow, with predictions of independent workers comprising half of the American workforce by 2028. Yet, our understanding of the emerging workforce in the gig economy is still in its initial stage.



Thus, this minitrack calls for research on the following three critical aspects of crowdsourcing:

(1) crowdsourcing, crowd worker and digital workforce; (2) work design and crowdsourcing work environment; and (3) gig work and workers in the gig economy.



Topics

Topics on crowdsourcing, crowd workers and digital workforce include, but are not limited to:

--Crowd worker participation and motivation

--Crowd worker community

--Emerging digital professions and professional development

--Employment relations in crowdsourcing

--Ethical issues in managing the digital workforce

--Global workforce in the crowdsourcing

--Psychological aspects of digital workplace (e.g., Technostress)

--Skill development and career pathways of digital workforce



Topics on work design and crowdsourcing work environment include, but are not limited to:

--Crowdsourcing for microtasking

--Task design for crowd engagement

--Crowdsourcing contest design

--Institutional practices and policies for crowdsourcing

--Management and practice of work in hyper-digital environments

--New work routines and future work design

--Regulatory challenges of crowdsourcing



Topics on gig work and gig workers in the gig economy include but are not limited to:

--Gigs and task design

--Gig worker motivation

--Employment relations in the gig economy

--Community effects of a distributed digital workforce

--Job and career opportunities in the gig economy

--Organizational and regulatory challenges in the gig economy

--Psychological well-beings of the gig workers

--Work-life balance of the gig workers



Important Dates

April 15, 2019:               Beginning of Submission Period

June 15, 2019:               Paper Submission Deadline (11:59 pm HST)

August 17, 2019:           Notification of Acceptance/Rejection

September 22, 2019:    Deadline for Final Manuscript

October 1, 2019:           Deadline for at least one author to register for the conference

January 7, 2020:            Symposia, Workshops, and Tutorials

January 8-10, 2020:      Paper Presentations



Co-Chairs of the “Crowdsourcing and Digital Workforce in the Gig Economy” Minitrack

Nancy Deng (Primary Contact) |ndeng at csudh.edu

Sara Moussawi | smoussaw at andrew.cmu.edu

Joseph D. Taylor | joseph.taylor at csus.edu


http://hicss.hawaii.edu/