Project abstract and schedule for launching the ad for our next Crowd Research cohort

[mbernst]

We are coordinating with the Stanford Crowd Research Initiative (crowdresearchinitiative.stanford.edu) to launch advertisements for our next cohort. The likely plan is to launch the website next Wednesday (12/27). We need an abstract, and we should be in that list.

Proposal

Concretely, this proposal affirms that we are participating in the next Crowd Research Initiative process when it opens. We will integrate these members into our cohort (exact policy being developed over in #12).

Here is a proposed project abstract, drawn and adapted from our last one:

Design the Future of the Gig Economy
Advisor: Michael Bernstein, Stanford Computer Science

More and more work today is being completed by paid workers online: gathering data, labeling machine learning training examples, running experiments, or transcribing audio, and many more. Today platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com) are dominant. However, these platforms are notoriously bad at ensuring work quality, producing fair wages for workers, and brokering trust between parties. It's not hard to imagine that we could do better. What would it take to create an effective marketplace? One where workers have more power in the employment relationship, or could take additional responsibility for the result quality? How might we design such a market? Could we launch it and become the new standard?

Previous Crowd Research Initiative participants have worked together to begin creating and launching a research platform called Daemo (https://www.daemo.org): a research crowdsourcing platform. Crowd Research Initiative participants have published top-tier Computer Science research papers throught his project (see http://crowdresearchinitiative.stanford.edu/ for examples). Join our project to help design and create the future of work --- possible projects involve task design, platform governance, data mining the platform's historical datasets, and helping debug stalled tasks. This research in human-computer interaction will involve a combination of design thinking, web development, and experimental design.

Research area: human-computer interaction
Required skills: none
Optional, but extremely helpful skills: web programming, design or human-computer interaction (e.g., hci-class.org)
Link: daemo.org

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I believe that signups will run through mid-January (will update here when I know for sure). We will then onboard them as soon as we can, and plan for a WIP submission at the 10-15 week mark so the participants have something to look forward to.

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[mbernst]

Link to the projects from the first time: https://aspiringresearchers.soe.ucsc.edu/project.html

[mbernst]

Confirmed: signups open 12/27 and close 1/25.

[neilthemathguy]

Instead of Design the Future of the Gig Economy we can call it Design the Future of the Crowdsourcing Platforms This is much more targeted and conveys the effort of Daemo.

It will also help to have consistent title or theme we had for the previous batches.

[mbernst]

@neilthemathguy 👍

[anasserhussien]

I think it might be helpful if we add

• That the project has contributors from allover the world and anyone can apply regions don't matter as 'Stanford' may give the impression it's for people in US only and building a research platform remotely that's something not happening everyday.
• The benefits that a contributor to the project could have beside the research experience like recommendations letters and so on.

[mbernst]

@anasserhussien great! I'll convey this back to @rvaish, since that messaging is part of the crowdresearchinitiative.stanford.edu call, rather than the individual project abstracts.

[neilthemathguy]

The ad needs more detailed information so that people can decide whether to join or not. I'll add the sections soon.

[neilthemathguy]

Here are few things new cohort should know before joining the project. I think this would avoid many issues. Feel free to add more to this.

• Detailed information about the affiliation policy
• Chronological development of the project since its inception (2015). This includes all the major milestones and respective contributors. This can be addressed by the Respect and Recognition with the Contributors Page in Daemo #21
• Detailed information about the benefits an individual will and will not receive for her or his contributions. It is important to communicate the value of time people spend-- for example, if someone spends one month what's the individual outcome vs. someone spends 3 years.
• Detailed information about the risks (e.g., public or private attacks, misattribution or stealing of ideas) associated with the project along with steps to protect individuals from the the risks.

Let me know your thoughts on how to incorporate following in the Ad or the Google form.

[mbernst]

Sure. My initial thought would be that 1, 3, and 4 might be common to all Crowd Research projects and we could ask Rajan to include them in the Google Form to cover all projects. 2 might be linkable from or summarized in the two paragraph abstract we have above.

[rvaish]

All four can be addressed in the form of FAQs in my opinion. We can add a specific note that 2nd point is a question for Daemo project specifically. I'll add it to our FAQs on the webpage and encourage participants to read them before they agree to sign up, I can even make a mandatory checkbox that states that they have gone through the FAQs. Can someone/collective take a first pass? Thanks.