- Collaborative brainstorming allowed for diverse contributions from all team members
- Individual contributions were more visible
- Bottom-up approach allowed participants to see their projects from a different perspective
- Anonymity of the process allowed participants to enter contributions rapidly without feeling self-conscious
- Participants could finish their tasks and move on without having to wait for their group members, maximizing productivity and minimizing need for coordination
- Collocated setting allowed for group members to coordinate outside of the tool and stimulate discussion among themselves to generate new ideas, overcoming common problems associated with remote collaborative writing


Benefits of the MicroWriter System

- Bottom-up approach made it harder to see the big picture
- Having to split attention between screen and face-to-face communication made the process frustrating
- Although participants were able to produce coherent paragraphs using collaboratively-generated ideas, coherency between different paragraphs in the paper needed improvement
- Did not fully eliminate the need for external coordination; tasks themselves did not provide enough context for individuals to complete them independently
- Responses from groups with fewer people were more positive, meaning that larger groups still encounter more coordination issues using this system of writing

Drawbacks of the MicroWriter System

A system of collaborative writing that breaks the process down into three types of microtasks: 

- 1) Idea Generation: wherein collaborators brainstorm and collect raw ideas to be included in the final report;

- 2) Labelling: wherein these ideas are labelled and organized into clusters based on relatedness;

- 3) Writing: wherein related ideas collected under the same label are merged into a single coherent paragraph.


New York University

University of Michigan - Ann Arbor

The use of microtasks to break down large-scale collaborative projects into small chunks that can be conducted individually and with little need for coordination between individual workers. 

Microtasks in Crowd Work

Teevan, J., Iqbal, S. T., & Von Veh, C. (2016, May). Supporting Collaborative Writing with Microtasks. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 2657-2668).

Supporting Collaborative Writing with Microtasks

MicroWriter

Approach to support communication of task context between requester and crowd workers using short, structured tasks. The goal is to reduce the effort of communication and maximize guidance. 

Structured Communication for Complex tasks 

Completing a set of microtasks in succession. The ways that microtasks are ordered in a chain affects the extent to which people complete the tasks productively and accurately and continue to engage with subsequent tasks.

Microtask Chaining

A marketplace for microtasks that helps people accomplish a variety of tasks with workers from all around the world in a less amount of time and cost compared to normal ways.


Amazon Mechanical Turk 

In order to make microtask crowdsourcing more supportive for interface design,   a workflow that can help task owners to break down interface design tasks more easily is needed. This paper briefly describes three experiments that help inform various aspects of workflow design for interface design through microtask crowdsourcing.


A Brief Perspective on Microtask Crowdsourcing Workflows for Interface Design


Tools for Crowd Work

This paper proposed a micro-tasking framework that supports skill development of individual workers. Researchers designed the framework based on the review of two micro-tasking projects we have conducted. It consists of four key components, a tutorial generator, a task dispatcher, a feedback visualizer, and a skill assessment engine. The framework will help developers create sustainable micro-tasking systems


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