The morphing organization: Rethinking groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork

Abstract

Web 2.0 has provided organizations remarkable opportunities to improve productivity, gain competitive advantage, and increase participation by engaging a crowd to accomplish tasks at scale. However, establishing and integrating crowd-based systems into organizations is still an open question. The systems and the collaborative processes they enable appear diametrically in dissonance with the norms and culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing in traditional organizations. They require mechanisms for articulation of work, coordination, cooperation, and knowledge co-creation that are fundamentally different from those in current groupwork systems and processes. Building on two workshops hosted at ACM CSCW 2014, we will explore questions such as: How does the shift in organizational work from a closed system with known individuals, to an open and crowd model that requires engagement with an undefined network of people, affect how we conceptualize groupwork? What are the implications for the design of groupwork systems? What can the crowdsourcing research community learn from groupwork systems, or conversely what can groupwork researchers learn from crowdsourcing? How do cultures, motivations, ownership and representation fit into these systems? This workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners in crowdsourcing, social computing, collaborative technologies, organizational science, and workplace research, to discuss the future of groupwork systems in the era of crowdwork with the goal of articulating an agenda for future research.