The Workers' Algorithm Observatory (WAO)
Algorithmic management
Bias & discrimination
What can I learn?
A crowdsourced auditing collaboration, based at Princeton, that helps workers and their allies investigate black-box algorithmic systems. The WAO gathers the data needed for meaningful, scientific audits and builds tools and support for workers. Launched in 2022 with funding from the Mozilla Tech Fund's "Auditing AI" cohort.
Core insight
Opaque algorithmic management systems can be held to account from the outside: when the workers subject to a system pool their own data, they can audit it collectively even without the company's cooperation.
How to use it in daily work
A concrete model of what citizen- and worker-led algorithmic accountability looks like in practice — useful when explaining that people are not powerless in the face of black-box systems.
- Point a client affected by platform management to the idea of collective data-pooling as a route to understanding an opaque system.
- Use the WAO as a case study when discussing what oversight of algorithmic systems can realistically achieve.