Organizer: Nordic Centre for Internet and Society

This one-day workshop will be held on Saturday, November 3, 2018 at CSCW 2018 in New York City’s Hudson River (Jersey City).

The workshop addresses the changing nature of work and the important role of exchange platforms as both intermediaries and managers. It aims to bring together interdisciplinary and critical scholars working on the power dynamics of digitally mediated labor. By doing so, the workshop provides a forum for discussing current and future research opportunities on the digital economy, including the sharing economy, the platform economy, the gig economy, and other adjacent framings. Of particular interest to this workshop is the intersection between worker and provider subjectivities and the roles platforms take in managing work through algorithms and software. For more details, see our workshop proposal (pdf). The workshop will consist of diverse activities, with an emphasis on in-depth conversations and community building.

Keynote: Nicole Immorlica from Microsoft Research will give a keynote address followed by a Q & A session. Nicole’s research on market design will invite the workshop participants to consider the design(s) of the digital economy from an economic perspective, which we expect will be new and thought-provoking to the participants.

Workshop goals

• Bring together researchers within (and where possible beyond) the CSCW community who study digitally mediated labor
• Work towards a shared agenda for research and other action; working through questions regarding how exchange platforms as spaces and connectors affect broader CSCW concerns and what roles design can play in creating, affirming, or removing power asymmetries
• Encourage interaction and collaboration not just between researchers, but also with practitioners and activists working on related issues
• Support and scaffold collaborative efforts that exceed the short duration of the workshop
• Facilitate the formation of this sub-community in CSCW and HCI, and discuss possibilities for a lightweight collaborative infrastructure to sustain it (e.g., a listserv or a wiki page for resources)