Algorithms increasingly govern societal functions, impacting multiple stakeholders and social groups. How can we design these algorithms to balance varying interests in a moral, legitimate way? As one answer to this question, we present WeBuildAI, a collective participatory framework that enables people to build algorithmic policy for their communities. The key idea of the framework is to enable stakeholders to construct a computational model that represents their views and to have those models vote on their behalf to create algorithmic policy. As a case study, we applied this framework to a matching algorithm that operates an on-demand food donation transportation service in order to adjudicate equity and efficiency trade-offs. The service's stakeholders--donors, volunteers, recipient organizations, and nonprofit employees--used the framework to design the algorithm through a series of studies in which we researched their experiences. Our findings suggest that the framework successfully enabled participants to build models that they felt confident represented their own beliefs. Participatory algorithm design also improved both procedural fairness and the distributive outcomes of the algorithm, raised participants' algorithmic awareness, and helped identify inconsistencies in human decision-making in the governing organization. Our work demonstrates the feasibility, potential and challenges of community involvement in algorithm design.

As algorithms increasingly take managerial and governance roles, it is ever more important to build them to be perceived as fair and adopted by people. With this goal, we propose a procedural justice framework in algorithmic decision-making drawing from procedural justice theory, which lays out elements that promote a sense of fairness among users. As a case study, we built an interface that leveraged two key elements of the framework---transparency and outcome control---and evaluated it in the context of goods division. Our interface explained the algorithm's allocative fairness properties (standards clarity) and outcomes through an input-output matrix (outcome explanation), then allowed people to interactively adjust the algorithmic allocations as a group (outcome control). The findings from our within-subjects laboratory study suggest that standards clarity alone did not increase perceived fairness; outcome explanation had mixed effects, increasing or decreasing perceived fairness and reducing algorithmic accountability; and outcome control universally improved perceived fairness by allowing people to realize the inherent limitations of decisions and redistribute the goods to better fit their contexts, and by bringing human elements into final decision-making.

Algorithms increasingly govern societal functions, impacting multiple stakeholders and social groups. How can we design these algorithms to balance varying interests and promote social welfare? As one response to this question, we present WeBuildAI, a social-choice based framework that enables people to collectively build algorithmic policy for their communities. The framework consists of three steps: (i) Individual belief elicitation on governing algorithmic policy, (ii) voting-based collective belief aggregation, and (iii) explanation and decision support. We applied this framework to an efficient yet fair matching algorithm that operates an on-demand food donation transportation service. Over the past year, we have worked closely with the service’s stakeholders to design and evaluate the framework through a series of studies and a workshop. We offer insights on belief elicitation methods and show how participation influences perceptions of governing institutions and administrative algorithmic decision-making.

Software algorithms are changing how people work in an ever-growing number of fields, managing distributed human workers at a large scale. In these work settings, human jobs are assigned, optimized, and evaluated through algorithms and tracked data. We explore the impact of this algorithmic, data-driven management on human workers and work practices in the context of Uber and Lyft, new ridesharing services. Our findings from a qualitative study describe how drivers responded when algorithms assigned work, provided informational support, and evaluated their performance, and how drivers used online forums to socially make sense of the algorithm features. Implications and future work are discussed.