Dear AIRers, Please consider submitting a workshop paper, and spreading the word about the following workshop at ECSCW: *Examining the Essence of the Crowds: Motivations, Roles and Identities* *A workshop at **ECSCW 2015* <http://www.ecscw2015.no/>*, September 19, in Oslo, Norway.* In this one-day workshop we will examine the crowd’s motivation factors, roles and identities both in voluntary and paid crowdsourcing. We encourage diverse and creative methods and theoretical frameworks in this one-day workshop. We invite both empirical and theoretical work, position papers and works in progress. We will apply interactive methods in exploring the topics like small group discussions and flash presentations. The workshop will result into a research agenda, in which we, as a part of the ECSCW community, present a roadmap for addressing these questions. This deliverable which will be posted online and shared widely. The workshop builds on three earlier successful workshops: *Back to the Future of Organizational Work: Crowdsourcing Digital Work Marketplaces* and *Structures for Knowledge Co-creation between Organizations and the Public *hosted at ACM CSCW 2014, and *The Morphing Organization — Rethinking Groupwork Systems in the Era of Crowdwork* hosted at ACM GROUP 2014. *Submissions* In this ECSCW workshop we seek to address questions surrounding motivation factors, roles and identities of participants in both voluntary and paid crowdsourcing. We invite work on coordination and collaboration mechanisms that help development and organization of crowdsourcing systems. These mechanisms could include use of external information sources, freeware and software materials, communication tools beyond those provided by the platform, etc. We invite both empirical and theoretical work, position papers and works in progress. We encourage diverse and creative methods and theoretical frameworks in examining these aspects. The questions and topics the workshop will explore include the following ones, but are not limited to: - Motivation factors of the crowd in paid and voluntary crowdsourcing, and in short-term and long-term crowdsourcing initiatives - Collaboration and coordination mechanisms in crowdwork - The roles participants take in crowdsourcing projects in different contexts, and the processes in which they take their roles - The boundaries between newcomers and experts, highly active participants and more passive ones, moderators and mentors, the stages in which the participants grow into these roles and switch back and forth. - The crowd’s demographic profile in a variety contexts - The artefacts that the crowd uses for conducting their tasks and monitoring their work individually and as a community The maximum length of a paper is 2,000 words. The papers should follow the ECSCW formatting guidelines. More information here. <http://ecscw2015.blogs.dsv.su.se/> *Deadline for submissions is July 1st.* Submissions and inquiries shall be sent to the following email address: crowdessence@gmail.com *Organizers* ▪ Tanja Aitamurto, Stanford, United States. ▪ Obinna Anya, IBM Research, United States. ▪ Laura Carletti, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. ▪ Neha Gupta, University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. ▪ Karin Hansson, Stockholm University, Sweden. ▪ Juho Lindman, Swedish School of Economics, Finland. ▪ Brandie Nonnecke, UC Berkeley, United States. best, Tanja Aitamurto, Ph.D. Deputy Director Brown Fellow, postdoctoral The Brown Institute for Media Innovation <http://brown.stanford.edu/> School of Engineering Stanford www.tanjaaitamurto.com <http://brokenfence.flavors.me/> ~ examining collective intelligence in journalism, governance and design ~