From alienation to relation: Modes of production in crowd work

While crowdsourcing has proved to be a useful method in several contexts, the power relations in crowdsourced processes remain largely unexamined. For designing better crowdsourcing technologies and processes, it is important to understand those power structures and relations within the crowd itself as well as between the participants: who has the power, what is being produced through crowdsourcing and how. Therefore in this paper we develop a typology of participation in crowdsourcing by examining crowdsourcing tools framed by Marx theory of alienation. We show how these types of crowd work can be described as levels of alienation where the worker, the consumer, their relations, and products are connected in modes of production representing different ontologies. Karin Hansson, Tanja Aitamurto, Thomas Ludwig, Michael Muller (2016): From alienation to relation: Modes of production in crowd work. In Karin Hansson, Tanja Aitamurto, Thomas Ludwig, Michael Muller (Eds.), International Reports on Socio-Informatics (IRSI), Proceedings of the CSCW 2016 – Workshop: Toward a Typology of Participation in Crowdwork (Vol. 13, Iss. 1, pp. 13-22)