Motivating Multi-Generational Crowd Workers in Social-Purpose Work
Masatomo Kobayashi, Shoma Arita, Toshinari Itoko, Shin Saito, Hironobu Takagi · 2015 · CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing · doi:10.1145/2675133.2675255
Summary
This CSCW 2015 paper from IBM Research Tokyo and the University of Tokyo investigates how to sustain a volunteer community in 'social-purpose crowdsourcing' — crowd work with altruistic goals such as supporting libraries or producing materials for people with disabilities. The authors argue that existing motivation research has focused on paid platforms like Mechanical Turk and a narrow demographic (mostly young workers); little is known about what keeps multi-generational volunteer communities active over time. Their primary contribution is a four-quadrant motivation model that cross-cuts two dimensions — intrinsic vs extrinsic and personal vs social — producing sixteen structured motivation factors (Skill Fitness, Task Identity, Task Autonomy, Direct Feedback, Fun, Community Identification, Social Contribution, Community Reciprocity, Payment, Pastime, Signaling, Human Capital Advancement, Personal Interest, Social Contact, External Obligations, and Indirect Feedback). The model synthesises Kaufmann et al.'s MTurk framework with Alam and Campbell's GLAM study. The authors then built a web-based crowdsourced proofreading system for a Japanese public Braille library, translating each quadrant into concrete product features: a community portal with Q&A forum and chat, three proofreading interfaces (Character, Ruby, Phrase), classroom seminars for seniors, downloadable manuals, hybrid task requests (user-requested plus library-queued), and a gamification panel showing contribution counts, rankings, and badges. The system ran for six months with 174 volunteers (roughly half aged 60+, ranging 19-84) completing more than 2.5 million micro-tasks, and was evaluated via system logs, a 55-respondent survey, and statistical analysis of motivation-behaviour correlations.
Key findings
Senior workers (60+) were more active and persistent than young workers, despite reporting weaker motivation on most survey items — in the second half of the six-month period, young volunteers' activity declined while senior activity slightly grew, and three of the ten top contributors were over 80. Contribution followed the Pareto distribution: roughly 20% of workers (the top ten) produced about half the output, but long-tail volunteers accounted for the remainder and their presence reinforced community identification for top contributors. Cronbach's alpha values (0.84-0.98 across quadrants) validated the four-quadrant motivation model as internally consistent. Intrinsic motivations dominated: Social Contribution scored highest (mean 6.04/7) and Task Autonomy highest among personal motivations (6.04). Seniors scored lower than youth on Skill Fitness, Task Autonomy, Fun, and Social Contribution — yet still worked longer, suggesting altruism or lower baseline need for skill-growth. Community Identification predicted continued participation (coeff = 0.87, p < .05). External Obligations and Task Autonomy were negatively associated with frequency. Accuracy was 97.7% overall, statistically identical across age groups. Gamification features showing collective book-completion counts outperformed individual rankings and badges for most workers, but long-standing contributors valued individual-contribution feedback more than dropped-out workers. Seniors preferred in-person classroom seminars and downloadable manuals over on-screen help.
Relevance
This paper is directly actionable for anyone building volunteer-driven accessibility services (assistive services, remediation communities, caption or alt-text collectives, accessible-book production). The evidence that older adult volunteers become dedicated, persistent, and accurate contributors — once onboarded with appropriate training materials — challenges the common assumption that crowd work is a young person's game, and suggests recruiting through libraries, classroom seminars, and offline channels rather than purely online signup flows. The four-quadrant motivation model provides a reusable structured vocabulary for designing and evaluating volunteer systems; Social Contribution messaging and collective progress indicators should take priority over individual rankings when the goal is community sustainability. Limitations include the single-project evaluation (a Japanese Braille library), cultural specificity, and the unpaid volunteer model which makes payment-related findings untested. Practitioners working on GLAM accessibility projects, captioning, or any other volunteer-dependent assistive service can apply both the motivation metrics and the concrete design patterns (hybrid task queues, multi-modal instructions, collective-feedback gamification) described here.
Tags: crowdsourcing · social-purpose crowdsourcing · motivation · gamification · GLAM · accessibility · assistive services · senior workforce · volunteer community · print disability · proofreading