Subcontracting microwork is the practice of letting crowd workers break a microtask into smaller pieces and pass parts of it to other workers, rather than treating each task on a crowdwork platform as an indivisible unit.
The idea was set out in "Subcontracting Microwork," a paper presented at CHI 2017 by Meredith Ringel Morris of Microsoft Research, 📝Anand Kulkarni, and co-authors. They argue that supporting subcontracting inside tasks would let crowdwork platforms create more value for requesters and workers alike, and they describe three models for it: real-time assistance, task management, and task improvement. Two experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk simulated parts of the approach and informed the paper's recommendations for designing future platforms.
Microwork itself is a series of small tasks that together make up a larger project completed by many people over the internet, usually tasks that still require human judgment. Subcontracting extends the model by letting the unit of work change shape as workers discover what a task needs.
📝Crowdbotics is built on the concepts explored in this paper. Crowdbotics demonstrates that complex work, such as building an application from a drawing, can be completed by a decentralized group of people. We call this an 📝Eat the Work company - a technology enabled service.