Improvising Harmony: Opportunities for Technologies to Support Crowd Orchestration

Abstract

This paper details the work of a seldom studied but growing population of members of grassroots, offline-project based groups. We aim to understand how these groups self-organize to enable a large number of volunteers to gather and “get things done,” and identify design opportunities for technologies to support such work. By studying the work structure, we identified two types of members, regular and episodic participants, who differ in structural role, motivation, and type of work they do. We studied two key tasks: 1) project management, which is mostly done collaboratively by the regular participants; and 2) organization of work events-the project implementation, which involve many episodic participants. For both tasks, we report on common practices and tools that are currently used. We then discuss design implications and user requirements for developing specialized tools to support these tasks.