Ethical Tensions, Norms, and Directions in the Extraction of Online Volunteer Work

Open to all CSCW 2022 attendees with a cap of 50 participants. Register Early!

Background


Online volunteer work such as moderating forums and participating in open source projects not only underpins today’s digital infrastructures, but also helps companies generate immense profits. However, there remains a lack of ethical norms around using volunteer labor for corporate interests, opening opportunities for unchecked extraction of online volunteer work at scale. This workshop makes a call for increased attention to ethical issues in the extraction of online volunteer work.


Workshop Goals

We invite the research community, online volunteers, and practitioners to discuss:

  1. What ethical tensions exist in the current approaches to extracting online volunteer work?

  2. What ethical norms should be followed or recommended?

  3. What are the opportunities for social computing technologies to promote these norms?

  4. Should online platforms be providing non-monetary compensation, such as education and resources, that is often promised in in-person volunteer settings?

If you have any questions, please reach out to tiziano.piccardi@epfl.ch.

Workshop Structure (DRAFT)

Speakers

Wikimedia Foundation

Community Data Science Collective

Hugging Face

Lightning Talks

Anna Gibson. Ethical Issues in Facebook Group Moderation

Kaylea Champion. Are We the Extractors? Evidence from Peer Production

Bogdana Rakova and Megan Ma. Online Volunteer Work and Algorithmic Audits - Mapping Existing Tensions and Evolving Community-driven Norms

Max Langenkamp. How Open Source Machine Learning Software Shapes AI


Organizers

Northwestern University

University of Minnesota

University of Minnesota

Northwestern University

Northwestern University

Carleton College

University of Cincinnati

Veniamin Veselovsky

EPFL

Call for Submissions

Individuals interested in giving a lightning talk at the workshop can submit an extended abstract before Sep 28, 2022. Submissions should be 2-4 pages long and should outline the author's research interests and how they relate to our workshop goals and other themes outlined in the full workshop proposal.

Accepted abstracts will be used to create subgroups for activities and adjust any activities appropriately, especially depending on the skew of time zones of participants.

Key Dates

Sep 21 Sep 28, 2022: Submission deadline. Submissions will be handled via Easychair, at https://easychair.org/my/conference?conf=eeovw22

Oct 10 12, 2022: Notifications

Nov 13, 2022: Workshop

Questions? Contact us at tiziano.piccardi@epfl.ch.