Crowd workers are distributed and decentralized. While decentralization is designed to utilize independent judgment to promote high-quality results, it paradoxically undercuts behaviors and institutions that are critical to high-quality work. Reputation is one central example: crowdsourcing systems depend on reputation scores from decentralized workers and requesters, but these scores are notoriously inflated and uninformative. In this paper, we draw inspiration from historical worker guilds (e.g., in the silk trade) to design and implement crowd guilds: centralized groups of crowd workers who collectively certify each other's quality through double-blind peer assessment. A two-week field experiment compared crowd guilds to a traditional decentralized crowd work model. Crowd guilds produced reputation signals more strongly correlated with ground-truth worker quality than signals available on current crowd working platforms, and more accurate than in the traditional model.
Crowdsourcing offers new forms of work arrangements enabled and facilitated by the advancements in Internet technologies and growing popularity of social media. However, do these new forms of work empower workers to craft their own careers or do they create a sweatshop where workers complete fragmented tasks to earn minimal pay? We posit that career theories and job crafting approaches collectively provide valuable theoretical perspectives for examining this question. By assessing the degree to which these platforms afford or constrain the workers to exert their personal agencies (i.e., affords career and job crafting preferences), we argue, will partially determine whether these new forms of work are a harbinger of worker empowerment or exploitation. Preliminary findings of this exploratory research-in-progress, conducted using two types of workers on Amazon-Mechanical-Turk, reveal that these new forms of work arrangements have a potential for both empowerment and exploitation of workers. Crowdsourcing is a key current topic in CSCW. We build upon findings of a few qualitative studies of crowdworkers. We conducted an ethnomethodological analysis of publicly available content on Turker Nation, a general forum for Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) users. Using forum data we provide novel depth and detail on how the Turker Nation members operate as economic actors, working out which Requesters and jobs are worthwhile to them. We show some of the key ways Turker Nation functions as a community and also look further into Turker-Requester relationships from the Turker perspective -- considering practical, emotional and moral aspects. Finally, following Star and Strauss [25] we analyse Turking as a form of invisible work. We do this to illustrate practical and ethical issues relating to working with Turkers and AMT, and to promote design directions to support Turkers and their relationships with Requesters. 