October 21st, 11:35 AM, Prof. Dr. Claudia Müller-Birn and Jesse Josua Benjamin will give the presentation "Designing for algorithm awareness in peer production systems" at the conference "Interdisciplinary practices in information design & visualization" in Potsdam.

The conference will take place from 19th-21st October 2018 at the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam (FH Potsdam).

Designing for algorithm awareness in peer production systems

Algorithms increasingly impact human decision-making by stimulating, informing, controlling and reacting to human activities, thus, necessitating the need for algorithm explainability. In this project, we investigate the RECOIN (Relative Completeness Indicator) tool as a use case for algorithm awareness; a current topic delineating the extent to which a person is contextually aware of the existence and function of algorithms. RECOIN is a tool for Wikidata, a collaborative knowledge base that stores structured data and supports numerous Wikimedia projects. RECOIN aims to augment human decision-making on data contributions by measuring the relative completeness of data items and by recommending potential contributions. With concerns over encoded cultural bias, RECOIN reflects the complexities of co-evolving social and algorithmic governance mechanisms. Addressing these issues, we showcase three distinct visualisation designs of RECOIN through the lens of algorithm awareness and discuss experimental findings regarding their varying effects on human decision-making and understanding.