Gauging Receptiveness to Social Microvolunteering
Erin Brady, Meredith Ringel Morris, Jeffrey P. Bigham · 2015 · CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems · doi:10.1145/2702123.2702329
Summary
This paper introduces the concept of social microvolunteering — a hybrid of friendsourcing and microvolunteering where volunteers install an application that posts microtasks to their social media feeds, enabling their friends to contribute to causes they care about. The researchers address a fundamental sustainability problem with crowd-powered accessibility systems like VizWiz: paid crowd workers are expensive, and volunteer pools are difficult to grow. Meanwhile, blind users are reluctant to use friendsourcing directly because of concerns about appearing dependent and having smaller-than-average social networks. Social microvolunteering solves this by having sighted volunteers act as intermediaries — they install the app on their Facebook accounts, and when a blind VizWiz user asks a visual question, it gets posted to the volunteer's Facebook feed where their friends can answer via comments. The researchers built Visual Answers, a Facebook application implementing this concept, and conducted both a survey of 350 Facebook users about attitudes toward social microvolunteering and a 12-day deployment with 91 participants who installed the app.
Key findings
In the survey, 55% of respondents were receptive to installing the Visual Answers application. Primary motivations included helping people with disabilities (88%), raising awareness of disability issues (69%), and feeling good about volunteering (48%). Of 350 survey respondents, 91 installed the application. Over 12 days, 24 VizWiz questions were posted across participants' feeds, generating 618 high-quality answers. The average time to first answer across all posts was 1 minute 45 seconds (median 1 minute 28 seconds), approaching VizWiz's near-real-time performance requirements. When posted to 9+ volunteer feeds, first answer speeds decreased sharply. Of 756 total comments, 618 (81.7%) were good-faith answers, with 91% of first comments being good-faith answers. Friends' answers came from personal friends (77.2%) or family members (31.6%), not weak ties. In post-study surveys, 95% of participants liked the application, 68% planned to keep it installed, 90% said Facebook was a good place for social microvolunteering, and most (65%) felt it did not disrupt their normal Facebook use. Payment was a significant factor in installation rates (chi-squared p=0.012), but many also installed without compensation.
Relevance
This research addresses one of the most pressing challenges in crowd-powered accessibility: sustainability and cost. While systems like VizWiz demonstrated that crowdsourcing can provide real-time visual assistance to blind users, the cost of paying crowd workers threatens long-term viability. Social microvolunteering offers an alternative model where the work of answering questions is distributed across volunteers' social networks at no cost, driven by altruism and social connection rather than payment. For accessibility practitioners, the key insight is that accessibility services need not rely solely on paid labor or dedicated volunteers — by embedding microtasks into platforms people already use (social media feeds), the barrier to participation drops dramatically. The finding that friends provided high-quality answers within minutes suggests that social networks could serve as a viable, sustainable workforce for accessibility microtasks. However, questions about long-term engagement, privacy (some VizWiz questions contain personal information), and scalability remain open.
Tags: crowdsourcing · microvolunteering · friendsourcing · social media · visual impairment · blindness · VizWiz · accessibility