Crowdsourcing Activities Research Articles

Qrowdsmith: Enhancing Paid Microtask Crowdsourcing with Gamification and Furtherance Incentives

Microtask crowdsourcing platforms are social intelligence systems in which volunteers, called crowdworkers, complete small, repetitive tasks in return for a small fee. Beyond payments, task requesters are considering non-monetary incentives such as points, badges, and other gamified elements to increase performance and improve crowdworker experience. In this article, we present Qrowdsmith, a platform for gamifying microtask crowdsourcing. To design the system, we explore empirically a range of gamified and financial incentives and analyse their impact on how efficient, effective, and reliable the results are. To maintain participation over time and save costs, we propose furtherance incentives, which are offered to crowdworkers to encourage additional contributions in addition to the fee agreed upfront. In a series of controlled experiments, we find that while gamification can work as furtherance incentives, it impacts negatively on crowdworkers’ performance, both in terms of the quantity and quality of work, as compared to a baseline where they can continue to contribute voluntarily. Gamified incentives are also less effective than paid bonus equivalents. Our results contribute to the understanding of how best to encourage engagement in microtask crowdsourcing activities and design better crowd intelligence systems.

Digital transparency and citizen participation: Evidence from the online crowdsourcing platform of the City of Sacramento

This paper examines the relationship between digital transparency and citizens' participation in government activity, specifically, online crowdsourcing. Many local governments have enhanced service transparency by disclosing and sharing information of government activities in digital format. These digital-driven transparency mechanisms often introduce interactive, tailor-made, and user-generating features to online government platforms. This paper explores the efficacy of digital transparency on citizens' participation in online crowdsourcing activities and its heterogeneous influences on various socioeconomic groups. Using the Propensity Score Matching and Difference-in-Differences (PSM-DID) method, this study analyzes the impact of digitized information disclosure to citizens' participation in Sacramento 311, an online crowdsourcing platform. It is found that enhancing digital transparency promotes citizens' participation in online crowdsourcing activities. Furthermore, results suggest that the influence of digital transparency on citizen participation is short termed and varies across communities of different socioeconomic conditions.

The use of crowdsourcing mechanisms in management learning

ABSTRACT While management education increasingly uses creative crowdsourcing techniques (e.g. hackathons and innovation crowdsourcing) to help students apply their knowledge to real business problems, this research examines crowdsourcing as a learning approach that enhances students’ learning experience, not by giving access to knowledge resources, but rather by creating a process that generates value and learning experience through active participation. Using an exploratory research (i.e. observations and in situ interviews) and a quantitative assessment (i.e. survey-based design), our findings show that students’ learning experience can be leveraged in the pre-activity stage (i.e. initial instructions, creative idea generation), and during and after the crowdsourcing activity (i.e. feedback from the company and from the instructor). We show that the learning experience is not only predicted by the informational value, but also by the social and enjoyment value, which can be enhanced through specific crowdsourcing activities. Further, our findings question the role of competitive settings in such learningconditions

Cross Academia and Public Citizen Engagement for Developing Active Citizenship Competences

This paper explored the effect of the different open cross-university and public knowledge building activities on participants’ active citizenship competencies. A survey was conducted with the participants from 7 activities in higher education context in the INOS project. The results report that active citizenship competences could be better developed in cross-academia and public citizen engagement activities that target collaborative knowledge building and data management rather than in more individual crowdsourcing activities. The results indicate that the politico-legal competencies were the most difficult to develop through different activities and they require more specific design concerns in the future citizen science activities.

The Effect of Community Managers on Online Idea Crowdsourcing Activities

In this study, we investigate whether and to what extent community managers in online collaborative communities can stimulate community activities through their engagement. Using a novel data set of 22 large online idea crowdsourcing campaigns, we find that moderate but steady manager activities are adequate to enhance community participation. Moreover, we show that appreciation, motivation, and intellectual stimulation by community managers are positively associated with community participation but that the effectiveness of these communication strategies depends on the form of participation managers wish to encourage. Finally, the data reveal that community manager activities requiring more effort, such as media file uploads vs. simple written comments, have a stronger effect on community participation.

Crowdsourcing framework applied to strategic digital city projects

If strategically implemented, crowdsourcing helps capture the intelligence of a variety of e-participation actors, enabling them to share the leading role with the government in decision-making processes. The objective is to elaborate an original crowdsourcing framework applied to strategic digital city projects. The research methodology is exploratory and descriptive. On the one hand, the model supports a systematic analysis of empowerment degrees of the e-participation actors to initiate task and innovation-oriented spontaneous crowdsourcing activities for solving wicked problems. On the other hand, strategic digital city projects play the role of passively monitoring spontaneous crowdsourcing activities, and actively planning and implementing government initiatives. The conclusion shows that the framework can encourage local governments to identify talents, influencers, and partners among different stakeholders – to discover what motivates them to participate and the rewards they expect – thus evolving strategies to welcome innovative projects, processes, products, and ideas in a continuous learning cycle.

Effects of Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivational Factors on Employee Participation in Internal Crowdsourcing Initiatives in China

The concept of crowdsourcing, categorized into internal and external crowdsourcing, emerged relatively recently. Internal crowdsourcing gained increasing popularity in Chinese organizations. Based on the self-determination theory (SDT), this study advances the theoretical understanding of the effects of employee motivation antecedents (the three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence, and relatedness) on participation effort in internal crowdsourcing activities. Through an online survey, 435 employees in information technology organizations in southern China completed the questionnaires which used for statistical analysis and hypotheses testing. It was found that the three basic psychological needs significantly positively impacted employees’ intrinsic motivation, with autonomy having the most significant effect. Furthermore, only the needs for autonomy and competence were significantly positively associated with extrinsic motivation. A positive relation was observed between intrinsic motivation and employee participation effort in internal crowdsourcing. Although no direct relationship was revealed between extrinsic motivation and employee participation effort, an indirect effect of extrinsic motivation on employee participation via intrinsic motivation was observed, which aligned with one of the main concepts of SDT, the internalization process of extrinsic to intrinsic motivation. Accordingly, the SDT model is applicable to information technology organizations in China based on the findings of this study.

Geospatial Blockchain: review of decentralized geospatial data sharing systems

Abstract. Blockchain technologies are driving the internet infrastructures into a transformation from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0. This remodels the internet foundations from a centralized approach, where data is hosted by a single actor, to a decentralized one in which data is distributed among peers in a network. Thanks to blockchain technologies, the evolution from centralized to decentralized applications (dApps) eliminate single points of failure, data censorship and data tampering. This transformation is not only important in the financial sector, where the technology is more evolved, but also in geospatial crowdsourcing activities. The objective of this work is to perform a literature review of current blockchain technologies used for sharing and crowdsourcing activities involving geospatial data. This study serves as a starting point for future works where the main purpose is to develop a geospatial sharing blockchain platform. At the present, two platforms have been developed for this purpose, FOAM and D-GIS. The former is a fully deployed implementation whose objective is to create a crowdsourced map. The latter is a platform designed to share geospatial studies publicly, however, it is only developed conceptually and not deployed. Additional to these works, other blockchain data sharing examples exist and are reviewed in this study as a baseline for future developments in the geospatial area. The output of this research indicates that it is feasible to use blockchain technology for the development of a crowdsourcing geospatial data-sharing platform.

Database management system for mobile crowdsourcing applications


 
 
 The evaluation of mobile crowdsourcing activities and reports require a viable and large volume of data. These data are gathered in real-time and from a large number of paid or unpaid volunteers over a period. A high volume of quality data from smartphones or mobile devices is pivotal to the accuracy and validity of the results. Therefore, there is a need for a robust and scalable database structure that can effectively manage and store the large volumes of data collected from various volunteers without compromising the integrity of the data. An in-depth review of various database designs to select the most suitable that will meet the needs of a real-time, robust and large volunteer data handling system is presented. A non-relational database was proposed for the mobile- end database: Google Cloud Firestore specifically due to its support for mobile client implementation, this choice also makes the integration of data from the mobile end-users to the cloud-hosted database relatively easier with all proposed services being part of the Google Cloud Platform; although it is not as popular as some other database services. Separate comparative reviews of the Database Management System (DBMS) performance demonstrated that MongoDB (a non-relational database) performed better when reading large datasets and performing full-text queries, while MySQL (relational) and Cassandra (non-relational) performed much better for data insertion. Google BigQuery was proposed as an appropriate data warehouse solution. It will provide continuity and direct integration with Cloud Firestore and its Application Programming Interface (API) for data migration from Cloud Firestore to BigQuery, and the local server. Also Google BigQuery provides machine learning support for data analytics.
 
 

Towards a Transdisciplinary Theoretical Framework of Citizen Science: Results from a Meta-Review Analysis

This work intends to lay the foundations for a theoretical framework of citizen science combining social and organizational implications with the support of information technologies. The proposed theoretical framework moves towards a shared and common research process between experts and citizens to deal with environmental and social challenges. The role and capacity of online communities is explored and their engagement capacity by means of web-based digital platforms supporting crowdsourcing activities. In this contribution, authors highlight the most common practices, methods and issues of citizen science approaches adopted from multidisciplinary application fields to obtain insights for designing a new participative approach for organizational studies. To reach this goal, authors illustrate the results of a systematic meta-review analysis, consisting of an accurate selection and revision of journal review articles in order to highlight concepts, methods, research design approaches and tools adopted in citizen science approaches.

The National is Personal: Domestic Photographs in Israel’s Authorized Digital Heritage

This article explores the consequences of the digital heritagization of domestic photographs that the State of Israel has initiated as part of its aspiration to settle increasing tensions between traditional national values and modern identities in Israel’s Jewish hegemonic social sphere. The process has been realized through the implementation of the community-based crowdsourcing initiative Israel Revealed to the Eye. Launched in 2011, it was designed to identify valued expressions of perceived national heritage in the photographs kept in the households of Israeli citizens across the country, and incorporate them into a centralized database for their safeguarding, study and public deployment. The article opens with an investigation of the various circumstances that have officially led the state to consider domestic photographs as cultural resources of national significance. As well as examining whose heritage the digitized photographs effectively safeguard once absorbed into the database, it then analyzes how their collection through coordinated crowdsourcing activities has reconditioned definitions and understanding of national heritage in the country. In doing so, the article demonstrates that the digital heritagization of the photographs has assisted in mitigating citizens’ conflictual approaches to Israel’s national heritage without repressing contestations of the dominant cultural status quo.

A Reference Architecture for Blockchain-Based Crowdsourcing Platforms

Companies increasingly tender knowledge-intensive tasks using crowdsourcing platforms to gain access to scarce knowledge and skills otherwise out of reach, and in this way, gaining competitive advantage. Despite its potential, existing crowdsourcing platforms encounter several challenges, including (1) fragmentation of expertise, as there are many platforms, (2) distrust between task providers and crowdsourcing participants, as identity and past performance are often not known, and (3) inability to learn from experience due to a lack of openness. A reference architecture for blockchain-based knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing platforms to mediate transactions between demand and supply of knowledge is designed in this paper to overcome these challenges. A design science research method is followed to develop the architecture. The reference architecture shows how blockchain and smart contract components can be integrated to support and coordinate knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing activities. By removing traditional e-commerce intermediaries, blockchain reduces search friction, knowledge transfer costs, and cheating by task providers or crowdsourcing participants.

The Effects of Prize and Scheduling Strategies in Crowdsourcing activities

Crowdsourcing provides an efficiency mode to explore crowd knowledge resource. It can provide diverse solutions for problem solving. However, how to design crowdsourcing strategies to drive crowd to participate in crowdsourcing activities is the focus of crowdsourcing platform management. Extant research mainly concentrated on prize strategy whereas little attention has been paid to scheduling strategy. Yet holistic crowdsourcing strategy should incorporate both scheduling strategy and prize strategy. Based on motivation incentive theory, this research applied over 154 thousand crowdsourcing projects’ secondary data to examine the impact of crowdsourcing strategy. Both prize strategy and scheduling strategy have a positive effect on the number of participants. Furthermore, there is a positive interaction effect between prize and scheduling. These findings can enrich crowdsourcing theory and provide implications in crowdsourcing strategy design.

Language Teachers and Crowdsourcing

The paper presents a cross-European survey on teachers and crowdsourcing. The survey examines how familiar language teachers are with the concept of crowdsourcing and addresses their attitude towards including crowdsourcing into language teaching activities. The survey was administrated via an online questionnaire and collected volunteers’ data on: (a) teachers’ experience with organizing crowdsourcing activities for students/pupils, (b) the development of crowdsourced resources and materials as well as (c) teachers’ motivation for participating in or employing crowdsourcing activities. The questionnaire was disseminated in over 30 European countries. The final sample comprises 1129 language teachers aged 20 to 65, mostly working at institutions of tertiary education. The data indicates that many participants are not familiar with the concept of crowdsourcing resulting in a low rate of crowdsourcing activities in the classroom. However, a high percentage of responding teachers is potentially willing to crowdsource teaching materials for the language(s) they teach. They are particularly willing to collaborate with other teachers in the creation of interactive digital learning materials, and to select, edit, and share language examples for exercises or tests. Since the inclusion of crowdsourcing activities in language teaching is still in its initial stage, steps for further research are highlighted.

An Integrated Toolbox for the Engagement of Citizens in the Monitoring of Water Ecosystems

The monitoring of water ecosystems requires consistent and accurate sensor measurements, usually provided from traditional in-situ environmental monitoring systems. Such infrastructure, however, is expensive, hard to maintain and available only in limited areas that had been affected by extreme phenomena and require continuous monitoring. Due to climate change, the monitoring of larger areas and extended water ecosystems is imperative, raising the question of whether this monitoring can be disengaged from the in-situ monitoring systems. Due to climate change and extreme weather phenomena, more citizens are affected by environmental issues and become aware of the need to contribute to their monitoring. As a result, they are willing to offer their time to support the collection of scientific data. Collecting such data from volunteers, with no technical knowledge and while using low-cost equipment such as smart phones and portable sensors, raises the question of data quality and consistency. We present here a novel integrated toolbox that can support the organization of crowd-sourcing activities, ensure the engagement of the participants, the data collection in a consistent way, enforce extensive data quality controls and provide to local authorities and scientists access to the collected information in a uniform way, through widely accepted standards.

Broadening community engagement in clinical research: Designing and assessing a pilot crowdsourcing project to obtain community feedback on an HIV clinical trial.

Community engagement is widely acknowledged as an important step in clinical trials. One underexplored method for engagement in clinical trials is crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing involves having community members attempt to solve a problem and then publicly sharing innovative solutions. We designed and conducted a pilot using a crowdsourcing approach to obtain community feedback on an HIV clinical trial, called the Acceptability of Combined Community Engagement Strategies Study. In this work, we describe and assess the Acceptability of Combined Community Engagement Strategies Study's crowdsourcing activities in order to examine the opportunities of crowdsourcing as a clinical trial community engagement strategy. The crowdsourcing engagement activities involved in the Acceptability of Combined Community Engagement Strategies Study were conducted in the context of a phase 1 HIV antibody trial (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier: NCT03803605). We designed a series of crowdsourcing activities to collect feedback on three aspects of this clinical trial: the informed consent process, the experience of participating in the trial, and fairness/reciprocity in HIV clinical trials. All crowdsourcing activities were open to members of the general public 18 years of age or older, and participation was solicited from the local community. A group discussion was held with representatives of the clinical trial team to obtain feedback on the utility of crowdsourcing as a community engagement strategy for informing future clinical trials. Crowdsourcing activities made use of innovative tools and a combination of in-person and online participation opportunities to engage community members in the clinical trial feedback process. Community feedback on informed consent was collected by transforming the clinical trial's informed consent form into a series of interactive video modules, which were screened at an open public discussion. Feedback on the experience of trial participation involved designing three fictional vignettes which were then transformed into animated videos and screened at an open public discussion. Finally, feedback on fairness/reciprocity in HIV clinical trials was collected using a crowdsourcing idea contest with online and in-person submission opportunities. Our public discussion events were attended by 38 participants in total; our idea contest received 43 submissions (27 in-person, 16 online). Facebook and Twitter metrics demonstrated substantial engagement in the project. The clinical team found crowdsourcing primarily useful for enhancing informed consent and trial recruitment. There is sufficient lay community interest in open calls for feedback on the design and conduct of clinical trials, making crowdsourcing both a novel and feasible engagement strategy. Clinical trial researchers are encouraged to consider the opportunities of implementing crowdsourcing to inform trial processes from a community perspective.

INTEGRATION OF PARTICIPATORY MAPPING, CROWDSOURCING AND GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION SYSTEM IN FLOOD DISASTER MANAGEMENT (CASE STUDY CILEDUG LOR, CIREBON)

Ciledug Lor is a flood-prone area in Cirebon Regency. Flood disaster management can empower the community through participatory mapping and crowdsourcing activities. This study aims to analyze the level of floods, threats, vulnerabilities, capacities, risks and refuge locations in Ciledug Lor Village based on participatory mapping, crowdsourcing, and GIS. Various indicators of threat, vulnerability, and flood capacity are obtained from field survey, open data and official data that have been given a value and weight which are then processed using overlay analysis to obtain flood risk parameters. Determination of refuge locations used network analysis to find out the route, distance, and effective time. The results analysis and modeling showed the average flood level in Ciledug Lor reached 2.27 meters. The refugee location for Dusun Pamosongan and Dusun Kampung Baru are to the north close to the railway tracks. Meanwhile, Dusun Karanganyar and Dusun Genggong are in the Ciledug Bus Terminal. In the future, participatory mapping, crowdsourcing, and GIS are expected to build awareness and resilience of disaster.

Efficient, but Effective?

Virtual citizen science (VCS) projects have proven to be a highly effective method to analyse large quantities of data for scientific research purposes. Yet if these projects are to achieve their goals, they must attract and maintain the interest of sufficient numbers of active, dedicated volunteers. Although CSCW and HCI research has typically focussed on designing platforms to support long-term engagement, in recent years a new project format has been trialled -- using short-term crowdsourcing activities lasting as little as 48 hours. In this paper, we explore two short-term projects to understand how they influence participant engagement in the task and discussion elements of VCS. We calculate descriptive statistics to characterise project participants. Additionally, using calculation of correlation coefficients and hypothesis testing, we identify factors influencing volunteer task engagement and the effect this has on project outcomes. Our findings contribute to the understanding of volunteer engagement in VCS.

VOLUNTEER GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION IN AFRICA

Abstract. During the past few years much effort has been put into developing community-based methods to capture and analyze a large amount of data in a systematic manner. This new source of geo-referenced data could be very important throughout Africa where crowd sourcing activities or volunteered geographic information (VGI) enhance participation and decision making based on local knowledge. VGI has the potential to be a significant source of information for a variety of applications. It will especially help national mapping authorities to build and update their national geospatial datasets, and improve the availability and currency of the countries fundamental and thematic datasets. Governments therefore need to take proactive measures to develop strategies maximizing on the opportunity in the current technological development. This calls out the need to developing strategic guidance on how to strengthen the communities’ participation in data collection.The United Nations Economic commission for Africa developed a document on the best practices and principles for adopting community mapping and VGI in the mapping practices in Africa. An expert group meeting is held to gather experts in the field to discuss on the issues, review best practices and current status on citizen participation in community mapping and to develop a roadmap for the adoption of the technology and agree on the guiding principles. The outcome of the meeting resulted in the framing of guiding principles for community mapping which is published in 2017.This paper therefore provides overview of VGI in Africa and the efforts made to date.

Better together—Harnessing motivations for energy utility crowdsourcing activities

Energy utility firms operate under varying mandates throughout most of the world and typically must operate reliably with long planning cycles and requirements to meet bureaucratic scrutiny and regulatory toll gating to achieve both discrete plan approvals as well as their ongoing licenses to operate. One vehicle for gaining external insights and involving the stakeholders is crowdsourcing. Energy utility firms have a set of distinguishing characteristics (i.e. regulatory processes and stakeholder groups) that they must consider when implementing crowdsourcing activities to aid their planning and innovation strategies. To achieve constructive participation requires understanding and engaging the motivations of the population from which a firm wishes to draw input. We assert that customers’ interest, facilitated by digital age communication channels, can provide utility operators with an accessible, valuable resource to assist a wide range of planning and innovation activities. We use the Self-Determination Theory (SDT) lens, grounded by a set of in-depth interviews with utility industry professionals, to articulate motivations for members of the external customer community to provide value to the firms through crowdsourcing activities. We develop five propositions that collectively identify how energy firms should use SDT elements to design crowdsourcing activities.