Investigating Crowdworkers' Identify, Perception and Practices in Micro-Task Crowdsourcing

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is rapidly gaining popularity among academic and business communities. Yet, our understanding of this work way is still in its incipient stage, in particular regarding the increasingly large and diverse crowdworkers. As such, we aim to understand crowdworkers' perception and experience to themselves and their work from their own perspective. We explore this by a mix-methods study of crowdworkers in Ali, one of prominent micro-task crowdsourcing platforms in China. Our findings highlight crowdworker in Ali is not only a coded name, but also an identity with some positive attitudes and beliefs towards work and life. In particular, this identity provides many socio-psychological benefits for crowdworkers, which further contributes to their consistent engagement in Ali and proactive practices to improve crowdworker communities and Ali platform collaboratively. We according suggest that taking crowdworker identity as a lens for crowdsourcing research, and turning attention towards construction and expressions of crowdworkers' identity and values in their own context.