Crowdsourcing platform for workplace accessibility

Abstract

Our modern workplace is filled with information sources such as the Web, videos, documents and images. Each employee is required to learn from these sources to work effectively and to contribute to the company's business. Crowdsourcing services have a great potential to improve workplace accessibility by providing captions for meeting videos, describing key diagrams, and converting scanned materials into text files. However, it is risky to expose confidential materials in a public crowd. Crowdsourcing to employees who have knowledge and expertise may solve the issue of confidentiality, but it is difficult to reach them to access their "niche" spare time for tasks given their busy work schedules. Therefore, we propose a crowdsourcing platform to securely disseminate tasks to employees by inviting them to do microtasks. The basic strategy is akin to Web advertising. The system automatically suggests tasks to employees as a part of intranet webpages and in e-mail clients by considering work contexts, employee interests and expertise, and the security of the materials. We will first discuss the pros and cons of intraorganizational crowdsourcing and then propose the new crowdsourcing platform. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces General Terms Human Factors, Experimentation. Copyright 2013 ACM.