Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein, Stanford University
Melissa Valentine and Michael Bernstein, Stanford University
Flash Organizations: Crowdsourcing Complex Work Using Reconfigurable Organizatinoal Structures
Flash Organizations: Crowdsourcing Complex Work Using Reconfigurable Organizatinoal Structures
Abstract: The nature of work is being reshaped by computational systems, which increasingly draw on massive online labor markets to hire and direct workers’ behavior at scale. These crowdsourcing systems have accomplished work using pre-defined workflows, but this approach faces a fundamental limit: it can only complete tasks that are so modular and decomposable that they can be entirely pre-defined. We developed a crowdsourcing system that can achieve open-ended goals by combining the open call recruitment of crowdsourcing with the more sophisticated and reconfigurable coordination affordances of organizations. Our system creates crowd organizations, which automatically hire diverse online experts from massive online labor markets to populate computational structures inspired by organizations (roles, teams, and hierarchies), and then continuously reconfigure these structures to responsively adapt the crowd workers’ activities. We report a deployment in which crowd organizations successfully carried out open-ended product design, software development, and game production. This research demonstrates how computational systems can enable digitally networked organizations that flexibly assemble and reassemble themselves from a globally distributed online workforce to accomplish complex work.
Bios: Melissa Valentine: Assistant Professor at Stanford University in the Management Science and Engineering Department, and a core faculty member of the Center for Work, Technology, and Organization. She studies the changing nature of groups and teams in organizations, with a focus on team learning and design. She has conducted multi-method field research in a variety of organizational settings; current projects include team coordination in emergency medical care, synchronized group learning in cancer care, and complex group coordination in online labor markets.
Michael Bernstein: Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he is a member of the Human-Computer Interaction group. His research focuses on the design of crowdsourcing and social computing systems. This work has received five Best Paper awards and eleven honorable mentions at premier venues in human-computer interaction and social computing. Michael has been recognized as a Robert N. Noyce Family Faculty Scholar, and awarded the George M. Sprowls award, NSF CAREER Award, and Sloan Fellowship. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, and a master’s and Ph.D. in Computer Science from MIT.
A buffet lunch will be available at 11:45 a.m., and the seminar will begin at 12:00 p.m.