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Microwork in cybercafés is a promising tool for poverty alleviation. For those who cannot afford a computer, cybercafés can serve as a simple payment channel and as a platform to work. However, there are questions about whether workers are interested in working in cybercafés, whether cybercafé owners are willing to host such a set up, and whether w...
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Context 1
... deployed our application in three cybercafés of Pune, Maharashtra, over a period of six months. The locations of the cybercafés were chosen after informally surveying locality, size of cybercafés, number of users visiting cybercafés, hourly fees, and owner interest. Locality was one of the primary factors in decision making. The first net cafe was chosen in a relatively affluent and residential locality of Aundh in Pune, pictured in figure 3. The second cybercafé was chosen in the midst of one of the busiest roads surrounded by a number of educational institutes on the J.M. Road in Pune. The third net cafe was chosen next to the University of Pune, with a mix of college going and job seeker crowd. The users were trained via a “walkthrough power point presentation” and/or cybercafé owners. After that, the users were welcome to work as long and often as they wished, subject to a maximum daily earning of $2. Table I shows the demographic data for users in India. The income and education levels were higher than we intended, including primarily college students. In order to validate that our findings generalize, we repeated the experiment in a lower income settlement in a second country (Kibera, Kenya). We also conducted a second survey of café owners in Bhubaneshwar, Orissa, aimed at judging both the interest of owners and their financial ability to participate. The experiments in Kenya were conducted during a period of 15 days. The application was deployed in two cybercafés in Kibera, a slum in Nairobi. The café owners handled payment, just as in Pune, but were not asked to keep records of users or payments. Figure 4 shows the external view while figure 5 shows the interior of one of the cybercafes, with a worker using our application. In addition to the test application, a user study was performed to compare typing speed on basic mobile devices, mobiles with mini-keyboards, and computers. Twenty three users were given 3 minutes on each device to transcribe as many words as possible from a sheet of paper. These users were also surveyed for income, education, and computer knowledge. Table I shows the demographics of our user study population in Kenya. While most people had a high-school education, far fewer had college education, and income was substantially lower. Informally, we observed that the youth who hang out at cybercafes had good english language skills and moderate computer skills. We drew participants for the user study from both the cybercafés, and the wider community. We obseved that the older population in Kibera frequently did not speak english, and had frequently never used a computer. All participants were clearly very familiar with their own basic mobile ...
Citations
... The rapid growth of cybercafés in Africa has resulted in job creation, increased government revenue, improved internet access, greater entrepreneurship, and a greater involvement of woman in ICT [10]. Studies in Kenya suggest that cybercafés can provide effective informal work centres that can be used to generate earnings for the poor [23]. Telecentres have remained the most common public source of the Internet [24]. ...
Information and communication technology (ICT) has been widely used in attempts to address the diverse range of socio-economic challenges in Africa. Included in these initiatives is the establishment of public access computing (PAC) venues. PAC venues are spaces where the general public has access to computers and/or the Internet and are established to address ICT access in underserved and marginalized communities. Despite the good intentions of such interventions, the success and sustainability of PAC initiatives remain a challenge. A systematic literature review (SLR) was performed to determine the common challenges faced by PAC initiatives in Africa as well as the recommendations based on PAC success stories. These challenges and recommendations are subsequently evaluated against the Access, Capacity, and Environment (ACE) framework for PAC developed by Gomez. It is shown that the recommendations for PAC in Africa do not necessarily correspond to the identified challenges. In addition, a number of challenges and recommendations are identified that are not represented in the ACE framework. It is suggested that the ACE framework is extended to incorporate these factors in order to make it more relevant for PAC in Africa.
... research has highlighted the tremendous heterogeneity of the crowdworkers' socioeconomic backgrounds and motives. studies in sub-saharan africa and southeast asia suggest that, in particular, microwork constitutes a growing source of primary income in low-income countries (gawade, vaish, waihumbu, & Davis, 2012;graham et al., 2017;gupta, martin, hanrahan, & o'Neill, 2014). in the Us and western europe, conversely, crowdwork seems to constitute either a source of additional income alongside a primary dependent job, or a means of gaining experience in a certain profession or an opportunity for freelancers to get through periods when they have little other work (smith, 2016). Crowdwork can also provide an opportunity for people who are excluded from the labor market due to geographical remoteness, social exclusion (due to having a police record, a disability, or household and parenting duties), because it can be done from home (Boes, kämpf, langes, lühr, & steglich, 2014;kittur et al., 2013;zyskowski, ringel, Bigham, gray, & kane, 2015). ...
The term “crowdwork” describes a new form of digital work that is organized and regulated by internet-based platforms. This chapter examines how crowdwork platforms ensure their virtual workforce’s commitment and control its performance despite its high mobility, anonymity, and dispersion. The findings are based on a case study analysis of 15 microtask and macrotask platforms, encompassing 32 interviews with representatives of crowdwork platforms, and crowdworkers, as well as an analysis of the platforms’ homepages and community spaces. The chapter shows that performance control on crowd platforms relies on a combination of direct control, reputation systems, and community building, which have until now been studied in isolation or entirely ignored. Moreover, the findings suggest that while all three elements can be found on both microtask and macrotask platforms, their functionality and purpose differ. Overall, the findings highlight that platforms are no neutral intermediaries but organizations that adopt an active role in structuring the digital labor process and in shaping working conditions. Their managerial structures are coded and objectified into seemingly neutral technological infrastructures, whereby the underlying power relations between capital and labor become obscured.
... Molapo et al. [45] recommended role playing and skits to motivate frontline workers to share their opinions. Other researchers have explored reducing response bias by dissociating themselves from designs or artifacts [48,59], limiting direct contact with participants [23,57], or spending more time with participants in the field in the hope that they would be comfortable enough to provide critical feedback [21]. However, for the most part, the impact of these approaches on reducing response bias has not been systematically quantified. ...
Evaluations of technological artifacts in HCI4D contexts are known to suffer from high levels of participant response bias---where participants only provide positive feedback that they think will please the researcher. This paper describes a practical, low-cost intervention that uses the concept of social proof to influence participant response bias and successfully elicit critical feedback from study participants. We subtly exposed participants to feedback that they perceived to be provided by people 'like them', and experimentally controlled the tone and content of the feedback to provide either positive, negative, or no social proof. We then measured how participants' quantitative and qualitative evaluations of an HCI artifact changed based on the feedback to which they were exposed. We conducted two controlled experiments: an online experiment with 245 MTurk workers and a field experiment with 63 women in rural India. Our findings reveal significant differences between participants in the positive, negative, and no social proof conditions, both online and in the field. Participants in the negative condition provided lower ratings and a greater amount of critical feedback, while participants in the positive condition provided higher ratings and a greater amount of positive feedback. Taken together, our findings demonstrate that social proof is a practical and generalizable technique that could be used by HCI researchers to influence participant response bias in a wide range of contexts and domains.
... Another limitation of this work stems from our inability to account for genuine explanations of repeated participation, as detected using browser fingerprinting. For example, a false positive could result from crowd workers working in Internet cafes [9], or family members sharing a computer. ...
... 7 http://www.corestandards.org/8 Workers who correctly answer all 3 attention check questions embedded in the task.9 Workers who incorrectly answer at least 1 of the 3 attention check questions embedded in the task. ...
Quality control in crowdsourcing marketplaces plays a vital role in ensuring useful outcomes. In this paper, we focus on tackling the issue of crowd workers participating in tasks multiple times using different worker-ids to maximize their earnings. Workers attempting to complete the same task repeatedly may not be harmful in cases where the aim of a requester is to gather data or annotations, wherein more contributions from a single worker are fruitful. However, in several cases where the outcomes are subjective, requesters prefer the participation of distinct crowd workers. We show that traditional means to identify unique crowd workers such as worker-ids and ip-addresses are not sufficient. To overcome this problem, we propose the use of browser fingerprinting in order to ascertain the unique identities of crowd workers in paid crowdsourcing microtasks. By using browser fingerprinting across 8 different crowdsourced tasks with varying task difficulty, we found that 6.18% of crowd workers participate in the same task more than once, using different worker-ids to avoid detection. Moreover, nearly 95% of such workers in our experiments pass gold-standard questions and are deemed to be trustworthy, significantly biasing the results thus produced.
... These included difficulties understanding the intent of tasks and complex instructions, user interface issues, and differences in culture (Khanna et al. 2010). The Kelsa+ project (Gawade et al. 2012) demonstrated that low-income workers with limited literacy in English and computers, have the potential to develop skills when provided with access to resources. Whilst our research speaks to such issues of HCI, instructions, and task design, we also hope to inspire reflections on the design, functioning and management of platforms and marketplaces. ...
This paper examines how working in the global labour market of Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) impacts upon and is understood by two different groups of workers. To do this we report on two qualitative studies; one of US and another of Indian crowdworkers (or ‘Turkers’) that we analysed from an ethnomethodological orientation. Our data is naturalistic and comes from a variety of sources—interviews, observations and forum posts—where Turkers describe their work, and their understandings of that work and of the transnational market they work in. We compare and contrast their situations, their reflections on the marketplace and its global reach, and we take a look at their understandings of one another. Our focus is on ‘the work to making turking work’ (Martin et al. 2014). That is, the work that turkers do to organise and make sense of their work as they operate in the AMT marketplace, such that they can do so effectively. AMT is a technologically mediated marketplace—that is the distribution, completion and payment of work is done online, almost completely through the AMT platform. The design of the platform has important consequences for how Turkers experience and understand the market (including its global or transnational nature). We discuss how our findings relate to a variety of CSCW issues and provide an initial examination of how they relate to globalisation both as a mundanely experienced phenomenon and as a topic of academic interest. We finish the article by drawing on our own experiences in research and design to look at how technology can be used to intervene in a market like this to try to address imbalances in power and agency between employers and workers.
... Some experiments have tested these waters. Gawade et al. [8] explored whether or not cybercafés could become informal centres of work, by providing employment through microtasks. They recruited cyber cafés in India and Kenya, where they deployed a crowdwork application. ...
... While the workers were relatively slow, they were skilled enough to earn acceptable wages in the range of $0.50-$1.75 per hour. This study showed that, when provided with decent infrastructure crowdwork can thrive in developing countries [8]. This finding was also validated by the 18-month long Kelsa+ project which showed that even low-income workers with limited literacy in English and computers, have the potential to develop these skills when provided access to resources, peer support and the freedom to learn at their own pace [28]. ...
... While some families were fully supportive of turking and glad of the income it provided, others were less content and put pressure on the Turkers to find more suitable, regular employment within their domain of expertise. This was a nagging concern, especially for some of our graduates who had completed their degree 1 or 2 years ago 8 . In contrast, those with family circumstances preventing them from easily finding work elsewhere, such as househusbands and wives, were typically glad of the flexibility offered by crowdworking (see Vignette 5). ...
Previous studies on Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT), the most well-known marketplace for microtasks, show that the largest population of workers on AMT is U.S. based, while the second largest is based in India. In this paper, we present insights from an ethnographic study conducted in India to introduce some of these workers or "Turkers" -- who they are, how they work and what turking means to them. We examine the work they do to maintain their reputations and their work-life balance. In doing this, we illustrate how AMT's design practically impacts on turk-work. Understanding the "lived work" of crowdwork is a valuable first step for technology design.
Crowd sourced mobile microtasking represents a significant opportunity in emerging economies such as India, that are characterized by the high levels of mobile phone penetration and large numbers of educated people that are unemployed or underemployed. Indeed, mobile phones have been used successfully in many parts of the world for microtasking, primarily for crowd sourced data collection, and text or image based tasks. More complex tasks such as annotation of multimedia such as audio or video have traditionally been confined to desktop interfaces. With the rapid evolution in the multimedia capabilities of mobile phones in these geographies, we believe that the nature of microtasks carried out on these devices, as well as the design of interfaces for such microtasks, warrants investigation.
In this paper we explore the design of mobile phone interfaces for a set of multimedia-based microtasks on feature phones, which represent the vast majority of multimedia-capable mobile phones in these geographies. As part of an initial study using paper prototypes, we evaluate three types of multimedia content: images, audio and video, and three interfaces for data input: Direct Entry, Scroll Key Input and Key Mapping. We observe that while there are clear interface preferences for image and audio tasks, the user preference for video tasks varies based on the 'task complexity' - the 'density' of data the annotator has to deal with. In a second study, we prototype two different interfaces for video-based annotation tasks - a single screen input method, and a two screen phased interface. We evaluate the two interface designs and the three data input methods studied earlier by means of a user study with 36 participants. Our findings show that where less dense data was concerned; participants prefer Key Mapping as the input technique. For dense data, while participants prefer Key Mapping, our data shows that the accuracy of data input with Key Mapping is significantly lower than that with Scroll Key Input. The study also provides insight into the game plan each user develops and employs to input data. We believe these findingswill enable other researchers to build effective user interfaces for mobile microtasks, and be of value to UI developers, HCI researchers and microtask designers.
Technology developers continue to develop new information and communication technologies (ICTs) aimed at addressing longstanding problems in international development. However, the sheer number of unsuccessful projects shows the importance of better understanding the ways in which a given population uses technology, before attempting to build novel applications for that population. We argue that this means adopting a methodological approach that recognizes that ideas develop slowly over time. As a first step in realizing this process, we present results from an exploratory qualitative study of mobile phone and social media use among residents of an informal settlement, or "slum", in Nairobi, Kenya. Our fieldwork reveals how contextual factors unique to slum environments affect mobile phone ownership and Internet access. We use these findings to propose an alternative approach to design, which accounts for the realities of living in a slum, and engages with residents. We also address the need for greater reflexivity in ICTD research.
Crowdsourced microtasking has been largely accessible on personal computers. With the rather low penetration of personal computers in countries like India, this has meant that microtasking opportunities have been limited to the educated elite with access to PC and Internet. In this paper we explore the use of cybercafés as microtasking hubs, thus overcoming the need to own an Internet connected computer. We conducted a one week exploratory study with three cyber cafes in Bangalore - where we provided users with an opportunity to work on a few transcription tasks in the cyber cafe and earn in the form of mobile airtime (recharge). We also conducted in-depth interviews with users and cyber owners. Overall we found that successful adoption of a microtasking eco-system at a cyber café is highly co-related with the cyber café environment and owners motivation. We also uncover practice of "Pair Microtasking" -- where more than one person works on a single task and highlight its implications on task design and task accuracy.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/2525194.2525305
