The paper introduces flash organizations, a novel crowdsourcing paradigm that structures a transient, on‑demand crowd as a computationally‑encoded organization with roles, teams, and hierarchies. By de‑individualizing labor into role hierarchies (inspired by movie crews and disaster‑response teams) and enabling continuous reconfiguration through a version‑control‑style branching and pull‑request workflow, the system (named Foundry) lets leaders hire expert crowd workers from platforms such as Upwork within minutes, assign them tasks, and adapt the organization’s structure as work progresses. A field deployment of three flash organizations—an EMS trauma‑report app, a storytelling card game (True Story), and an enterprise workshop‑planning portal—demonstrates that complex, open‑ended goals can be achieved within six weeks, with 93 workers completing 639 tasks (3,261 person‑hours) and generating 52,000 lines of code and two 80‑card decks. The evaluation shows rapid on‑demand hiring (median 13 min), extensive use of pull‑request‑driven adaptations (566 total), and both top‑down and bottom‑up reconfigurations. The discussion situates flash organizations at the intersection of crowdsourcing and organizational design, argues for their potential to expand the scope of crowd work, acknowledges limitations (asset specificity, cultural/time‑zone challenges, reputation noise), and outlines future research directions.
Topics
Flash Organizations: Conceptual Shift from Microtasks to Organizational Structures
Defines flash organizations as crowds that are computationally modeled after traditional organizations—using roles, teams, and hierarchies—to tackle complex, open‑ended work.