Designing A Constitution for a Self-Governing Crowdsourcing Marketplace

Paid crowdsourcing platforms such as Upwork and Amazon Mechanical Turk must jointly serve workers, requesters, and platform owners. However, design and governance decisions tend to be made only by the owners, and in the business interests of the requesters, so the many stakeholders’ issues often remain unaddressed. In response to the resulting frustration and power imbalances, platform users created external tools for communication and platform monitoring [Irani and Silberman 2013], as grassroots alternatives to an improved platform design [LaPlante et al. 2016]. Similar solutions emerged in most paid crowdsourcing platforms [Yin et al. 2016], despite top down controls (e.g., [Amazon 2014; Upwork 2016; Vakharia and Lease 2013]). This trend of asymmetric governance undermines the anticipated future of paid crowdsourcing [Kittur et al. 2013]. In contrast to the top-down governance structures that paid crowdsourcing platforms currently use, we explored a bottom-up approach: open source governance [Rushkoff 2003]. We describe a crowdsourcing platform where constituents have full access to governing documents and participate in writing legislation through an iterative community process akin to how open source software is developed [O’Mahony and Ferraro 2007]. Open source governance has been used in online communities such as Jupyter [Jupyter 2015], and in physical communities such as in Iceland [Landemore 2015]. Crowdsourced democratic deliberation [Aitamurto and Landemore 2016] offers an effective bridging of these approaches into a mechanism driven by participant stakeholders. We introduce the Daemo constitution, a governance document designed to create a formal process for paid crowdsourcing marketplaces that allows and manages operational changes, driven by its users’ preferences. The Daemo constitution provides a set of laws governing the community and a mechanism for those laws to evolve through an amendment process. Workers and requesters may craft arguments for platform changes through amendments. The constitution frees the platform owners to make any design changes or improvements, as long as they do not violate the constitution or its amendments. A jury system arbitrates disagreements on interpretation of the constitution between the workers, requesters and the platform. We implemented the newly introduced Daemo Constitution on top of the open source crowdsourcing marketplace Daemo[Gaikwad et al. 2015]. With support from stakeholder communities, we have written and ratified the Daemo constitution and we are rolling out this approach to governance as the Daemo platform makes its public debut in 2017. This paper aims to discuss the underlying design of the Daemo constitution and the process we have used to develop and validate it so far.