Monthly Archives: February 2013

Understanding Crowdfunding Work: Implications for Support Tools WIP to appear at CHI 2013

Crowdfunding is changing the way people realize their work by providing a new way to gain support from a distributed audience. This study seeks to understand the work of crowdfunding project creators in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems. We conducted interviews with 30 project creators from three popular crowdfunding platforms in order to understand what tasks are involved and what tools people use to accomplish crowdfunding work. Initial results suggest that project creators carry out three main types of work—preparing the campaign material, marketing the project, and following through with project goals—and have adapted general support tools to facilitate doing this work. From our initial findings, we hope to improve and design future crowdfunding support tools and systems.

Crowdfunding: A Resource Exchange Perspective WIP to appear in CHI 2013

Online crowdfunding has gained attention among novice entrepreneurs as an effective platform for funding their ventures. However, a focus on the financial nature of the relationship has obscured the complex interpersonal in- teractions involving the exchange of non-financial re- sources. Drawing from resource exchange theory in the marketing literature, we look at the exchange of re- sources and the mechanisms that facilitate this exchange in online crowdfunding. We analyzed 81 popular online crowdfunding platforms to reveal the exchange of various resources including: money, love, information, status, goods, and services through mediated, unmediated, and hybrid structures. Using resource exchange theory as a lens, we examine crowdfunding as a new type of crowdwork platform and explain how resource exchange theory can help the HCI community understand new, crowdwork platforms (CHI2013_Crowdfunding_AResourceExchangePerspective)

Crowdfunding Support Tools WIP to appear in CHI 2013

Creative individuals increasingly rely on online crowdfunding platforms to crowdsource funding for new ventures. For novice crowdfunding project creators, however, there are few resources to turn to for assistance in the planning of crowdfunding projects. We are building a tool for novice project creators to get feedback on their project designs. One component of this tool is a comparison to existing projects. As such, we have applied a variety of machine learning classifiers to learn the concept of a successful online crowdfunding project at the time of project launch. Currently our classifier can predict with roughly 68% accuracy, whether a project will be successful or not. The classification results will eventually power a prediction segment of the proposed feedback tool. Future work involves turning the results of the machine learning algorithms into human-readable content and integrating this content into the feedback tool (pdf).

Join us for our talk on the Future of Crowd Work at CSCW 2013

Join us next week for our talk at the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work exploring the Future of Crowd Work.

Abstract: Paid crowd work offers remarkable opportunities for improving productivity, social mobility, and the global economy by engaging a geographically distributed workforce to complete complex tasks on demand and at scale. But it is also possible that crowd work will fail to achieve its potential, focusing on assembly-line piecework. Can we foresee a future crowd workplace in which we would want our children to participate? This paper frames the major challenges that stand in the way of this goal. Drawing on theory from organizational behavior and distributed computing, as well as direct feedback from workers, we outline a framework that will enable crowd work that is complex, collaborative, and sustainable. The framework lays out research challenges in twelve major areas: workflow, task assignment, hierarchy, real-time response, synchronous collaboration, quality control, crowds guiding AIs, AIs guiding crowds, platforms, job design, reputation, and motivation.