Gauging Receptiveness to Social Microvolunteering

Crowd-powered systems that help people are difficult to scale and sustain because human labor is expensive and worker pools are difficult to grow. To address this problem we introduce the idea of social microvolunteering, a type of intermediated friendsourcing in which a person can provide access to their friends as potential workers for microtasks supporting causes that they care about. We explore this idea by creating Visual Answers, an exemplar social microvolunteering application for Facebook that posts visual questions from people who are blind. We present results of a survey of 350 participants on the concept of social microvolunteering, and a deployment of the Visual Answers application with 91 participants, which collected 618 high-quality answers to questions asked over 12 days, illustrating the feasibility of the approach.

[1]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  What do people ask their social networks, and why?: a survey study of status message q&a behavior , 2010, CHI.

[2]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  A Comparison of Information Seeking Using Search Engines and Social Networks , 2010, ICWSM.

[3]  Lada A. Adamic,et al.  Visually impaired users on an online social network , 2014, CHI.

[4]  Erin Brady,et al.  Visual challenges in the everyday lives of blind people , 2013, CHI.

[5]  Jose Marichal,et al.  Political Facebook groups: Micro-activism and the digital front stage , 2013, First Monday.

[6]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Estimating the social costs of friendsourcing , 2014, CHI.

[7]  Hironobu Takagi,et al.  Social accessibility: achieving accessibility through collaborative metadata authoring , 2008, Assets '08.

[8]  J. Havens,et al.  Charitable Giving : How Much , By Whom , To What , and How ? , 2005 .

[9]  Yu-Hao Lee,et al.  Does slacktivism hurt activism?: the effects of moral balancing and consistency in online activism , 2013, CHI.

[10]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  Quantifying the invisible audience in social networks , 2013, CHI.

[11]  Ban Al-Ani,et al.  Bridging between organizations and the public: volunteer coordinators' uneasy relationship with social computing , 2012, CHI.

[12]  Rohini Lokare,et al.  FRAppE Detecting Malicious Facebook Applications , 2016 .

[13]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  Who gives a tweet?: evaluating microblog content value , 2012, CSCW.

[14]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Help is on the way: patterns of responses to resource requests on facebook , 2014, CSCW.

[15]  Luís Carriço,et al.  Friendsourcing the unmet needs of people with dementia , 2014, W4A.

[16]  Meredith Ringel Morris,et al.  Investigating the appropriateness of social network question asking as a resource for blind users , 2013, CSCW.

[17]  Ed H. Chi,et al.  Is Twitter a Good Place for Asking Questions? A Characterization Study , 2011, ICWSM.

[18]  David P. Anderson,et al.  SETI@home-massively distributed computing for SETI , 2001, Comput. Sci. Eng..

[19]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Calling All Facebook Friends: Exploring Requests for Help on Facebook , 2013, ICWSM.

[20]  Stephanie Vie,et al.  In defense of "slacktivism": The Human Rights Campaign Facebook logo as digital activism , 2014, First Monday.

[21]  Jeffrey Nichols,et al.  Asking questions of targeted strangers on social networks , 2012, CSCW '12.

[22]  Rob Miller,et al.  VizWiz: nearly real-time answers to visual questions , 2010, UIST.

[23]  Michael S. Bernstein,et al.  Micro-volunteering: helping the helpers in development , 2013, CSCW '13.

[24]  Mor Naaman,et al.  Fitter with Twitter: Understanding Personal Health and Fitness Activity in Social Media , 2013, ICWSM.

[25]  Richard E. Ladner,et al.  The design of human-powered access technology , 2011, ASSETS.

[26]  Cliff Lampe,et al.  Who wants to know?: question-asking and answering practices among facebook users , 2013, CSCW '13.