This article explores the notion of structured communication: using structured microtasks to support communication in the domain of complex writing. Different mechanisms are presented and compared in order to find the most effective and less costly ways to communicate with the crowd in the domain of writing. 
Proposal: limiting the requester’s interactions can result in less costly interactions that are just as beneficial


Communicating Context to the Crowd for Complex Writing Tasks 

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. 

Macalester College

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

Complex tasks are characterized in two ways: 
- (1) intellectually, they require reasoning and non-repetitive creativity and 
- (2) organizationally, they require multiple people working in multiple roles with interdependencies among the microtasks they perform


Complex Tasks in Crowd Work

Salehi, N., Teevan, J., Iqbal, S., Kamar, E., (2017) Communicating Context to the Crowd for Complex Writing Tasks. Stanford University, Microsoft Research. 
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998332

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.


MicroWriter

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


Skill Development Framework for Micro-Tasking

The most common participants in behavioral/psychological studies tend to be American college students, but with the rise of the internet, other forms of sampling have become more common, like using Amazon MTurk.

Separate but equal? A comparison of participants and data gathered viaAmazon’s MTurk, social media, and face-to-face behavioral testing

- Unlike microtasks, which support workers such that they would not require much expertise or context, macrotask crowdsourcing depends on workers with expert knowledge in one or more domains.
- While simple tasks can be easily decomposed and accomplished through microtasks, macrotask crowdsourcing can benefit complex tasks that involve open-ended and innovation-oriented work. 

Macrotasks in Crowd Work

- Complex tasks require situated action: constant reflection, revision, and adaptation toward one’s goals. The more complex the task, the more necessary adaptation becomes.
- Workflows streamline the work process, reducing the margin of error. 
- However, workflows are static, limiting situated action. As such, complex tasks have traditionally been difficult to achieve using workflows.  

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