Social implications of crowd sourcing in rural Scotland

Abstract

Various surveys mentioned that the benefits of ubiquitous crowdsourcing are reaped by people located in metro and smaller cities. The reach of crowdsourcing to rural population is questionable. The aim of this research is to bridge widening urban and rural divide by providing knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing tasks to rural work force which could provide long term benefits to them as well as improve supporting infrastructure. This paper reports an initial study of the demographic of small samples of twenty two rural homeworkers in Scotland, their motivation to do crowdsourcing work, present main occupation, computer skills, views on rural infrastructure and finally their skills on solving three spatial visualization tests. The survey shows that flexible hours of working, extra income, and work life balance are the three important factors emphasized as motivational constructs to do crowdsourcing work. Their skills on solving a spatial visualization test is equivalent to the literature reported results, and also high correlations are identified between these tests. These results demonstrate that with minimum training the homeworkers could able to solve knowledge-intensive industrial spatial reasoning problems to increase their earning potentials.