Open Contest Research Articles

Reimagining Health Communication: A Noninferiority Randomized Controlled Trial of Crowdsourced Intervention in China.

Crowdsourcing, the process of shifting individual tasks to a large group, may be useful for health communication, making it more people-centered. We aimed to evaluate whether a crowdsourced video is noninferior to a social marketing video in promoting condom use. Men who have sex with men (≥16 years old, had condomless sex within 3 months) were recruited and randomly assigned to watch 1 of the 2 videos in 2015. The crowdsourced video was developed through an open contest, and the social marketing video was designed by using social marketing principles. Participants completed a baseline survey and follow-up surveys at 3 weeks and 3 months postintervention. The outcome was compared with a noninferiority margin of +10%. Among the 1173 participants, 907 (77%) and 791 (67%) completed the 3-week and 3-month follow-ups. At 3 weeks, condomless sex was reported by 146 (33.6%) of 434 participants and 153 (32.3%) 473 participants in the crowdsourced and social marketing arms, respectively. The crowdsourced intervention achieved noninferiority (estimated difference, +1.3%; 95% confidence interval, -4.8% to 7.4%). At 3 months, 196 (52.1%) of 376 individuals and 206 (49.6%) of 415 individuals reported condomless sex in the crowdsourced and social-marketing arms (estimated difference: +2.5%, 95% confidence interval, -4.5 to 9.5%). The 2 arms also had similar human immunodeficiency virus testing rates and other condom-related secondary outcomes. Our study demonstrates that crowdsourced message is noninferior to a social marketing intervention in promoting condom use among Chinese men who have sex with men. Crowdsourcing contests could have a wider reach than other approaches and create more people-centered intervention tools for human immunodeficiency virus control.

Innovation and Crowdsourcing Contests

In an innovation contest, an organizer seeks solutions to an innovation-related problem from a group of independent agents. Agents, who can be heterogeneous in their ability levels, exert efforts to improve their solutions, and their solution qualities are uncertain due to the innovation and evaluation processes. In this chapter, we present a general model framework that captures main features of a contest, and encompasses several existing models in the literature. Using this framework, we analyze two important decisions of the organizer: a set of awards that will be distributed to agents and whether to restrict entry to a contest or to run an open contest. We provide a taxonomy of contest literature, and discuss past and current research on innovation contests as well as a set of exciting future research directions.

What Would an HIV Cure Mean to You? Qualitative Analysis from a Crowdsourcing Contest in Guangzhou, China.

Much HIV cure social science research has focused on high-income countries. Local key population perspectives, especially from people living with HIV (PLHIV), are needed in low- and middle-income countries. We organized an open contest soliciting responses from key populations, including PLHIV, about what a cure would mean in their lives. Tailored in-person events and social media were used to engage PLHIV, men who have sex with men (MSM), people who inject drugs, and local residents. We received 471 contributions over 4 months. Our thematic analysis showed that many people perceived that a cure would sterilize HIV and bring about new life for PLHIV. Many individuals believed a cure would decrease PLHIV discrimination and many MSM perceived a cure would decrease MSM discrimination. Some participants noted that a cure could help improve interpersonal relations, particularly with families and partners. Many individuals envisioned HIV cure as a panacea to bring about social stability. Some participants also anticipated changes in attitudes toward sex that may result in increased condomless sex. Our findings suggest a continued need for careful management of patient expectations and community engagement.

Wisdom of the Crowds: Crowd-Based Development of a Logo for a Conference Using a Crowdsourcing Contest.

Crowdsourcing methods have been widely used in business, but rarely in sexual health research. We evaluated a crowdsourced logo contest as part of an international human immunodeficiency virus conference. A logo crowdsourcing contest was conducted for the 20th International Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome Conference. Crowdsourcing has a group of individuals solve a task, often as part of an open contest. Semistructured interviews were conducted with key informants including contest organizers, contest contributors, and conference attendees. Interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed using a content analysis approach. In total, 22 interviews were conducted with 3 contest organizers, 7 contest contributors, and 12 conference attendees. All individuals reported that the crowdsourced logo provided benefits beyond branding the conference, including creating a shared sense of purpose among diverse conference participants and explicitly demonstrating the strong community orientation of the conference. Conference organizers and attendees all reported deeper engagement because of the story of the Tanzanian artist who won the contest. Most conference attendees (11/12) preferred the crowdsourced logo compared with the previous company-organized logo, and all (22/22) supported the logo contest continuing. Implementing a logo contest was simple and relatively inexpensive. Stakeholders identified several ways to enhance crowdsourcing logo contest methods including wider promotion of the contest to encourage broader participation, greater transparency in the selection process, and a different prize structure which acknowledges the contribution of more contestants. We found that a crowdsourcing contest helped engage local and global communities in the lead-up before and during an international conference. Similar participatory events may be useful for sexual health conferences and research projects.

Negotiating learning in early childhood: Narratives from migrant homes

The study investigates how parents of Polish ethnic background, resettled in Norway, reflect on their children's learning in Norwegian early years educational institutions through 19 qualitative interviews. With narratives of experience as the main theoretical and analytical vantage point, their negotiations of positioning towards the Norwegian educational practice are explored in the narrative worlds they construct, in the interactional context of the interview and in the wider socio-cultural contexts. While questioning, challenging and deliberating the observed practice through a variety of narrative formats and discursive means, their positions are shown to range from open contest to variable forms of ambivalence and acceptance, subject to thematic variation. The study thus provides a platform for the interviewed parents to orchestrate unique situated voices engaged in a discursive process of reflection on their children's new educational reality.

Incentives in Contests with Heterogeneous Solvers

In a contest in which solvers with heterogeneous expertise exert effort to develop solutions, a recent paper [Terwiesch C, Xu Y (2008) Innovation contests, open innovation, and multiagent problem solving. Management Sci. 54(9):1529–1543] argues that as more solvers enter the contest, every solver will reduce effort due to a lower probability of winning the contest. This paper corrects mistakes in this theory, and shows that there exist high-expertise solvers who may raise their effort in response to increased competition. This is because more entrants raise the expected best performance among other solvers, creating positive incentives for solvers to exert higher effort to win the contest. Because of this positive effect, we find that a free-entry open contest is more likely to be optimal to a contest organizer than what Terwiesch and Xu (2008) and other prior literature asserted. The e-companion is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2738 . This paper was accepted by Gad Allon, operations management.

This time it’s different? Effects of the Eurovision Debate on young citizens and its consequence for EU democracy – evidence from a quasi-experiment in 24 countries

ABSTRACT For the very first time in EU history, the 2014 EP elections provided citizens with the opportunity to influence the nomination of the Commission President by casting a vote for the main Europarties’ ‘lead candidates’. By subjecting the position of the Commission President to an open political contest, many experts have formulated the expectation that heightened political competition would strengthen the weak electoral connection between EU citizens and EU legislators, which some consider a root cause for the EU’s lack of public support. In particular, this contest was on display in the so-called ‘Eurovision Debate’, a televised debate between the main contenders for the Commission President broadcasted live across Europe. Drawing on a quasi-experimental study conducted in 24 EU countries, we find that debate exposure led to increased cognitive and political involvement and EU support among young citizens. Unfortunately, the debate has only reached a very small audience.

Investigation and Analysis on Crowdsourcing for Improving Enterprise QoS

Crowdsourcing is treated as open contest for the crowd of people known as workers. All workers can contribute their suggestions and solutions to the platform. Crowdsourcing can connect a large number of people and they can share their knowledge. The amount of unstructured data is increasing now. This is where crowdsourcing can help bigdata by breaking down the data into mini chunks and have the power of crowd to do the organising task. This helps analytic companies to focus on the core aspect of infrastructure and security. It makes sense of the data and not invests resources in organising the data and this distributed environment can be solved intelligently. Here various crowdsourcing techniques in different aspects related to data pre-processing, performance approaches, security issues and applications are analysed. Out of these approaches the most efficient one in each are characterised. The survey helps to analyse the various issues in crowdsourcing and existing proposed solutions for improving the quality of workers.

An Obstacle Factor Analysis and Suggestions for Implementing Open Innovation

Currently, the introduction of open innovation is considered as one of the important topics for the survival strategy, especially, in the ICT industry that has been continuously seeking to innovative ideas more quickly and effectively from the markets. In fact, implementing open innovation requires a high degree of technological openness and compatibility across organizations. But, cases are often reported that many businesses are going down the tubes during implementation of open innovation. This study tried to find the obstacle factors and their solutions based on a variety of preceding studies and case studies about the introduction of open innovation and the usage of collective intelligence, and also through conducting in-depth interview as a qualitative approach with both the organizers and participants of the startup alliance program and the open contest sponsored by the multi-national ICT companies in South Korea which is identified as one of the successful cases of open innovation. From the study, we hope it would offer helpful advice to bring a successful implementation of open innovation for ICT companies.

Crowdsourcing health communication about condom use in men who have sex with men in China: a randomised controlled trial

BackgroundThe Chinese government now encourages innovation, and more specifically, crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing, the process of shifting individual tasks to a large group, might reimagine health communication, making it more people-centred. We aimed to compare the effectiveness of a crowdsourced versus social marketing condom promotion video to promote condom use. MethodsA non-inferiority randomised controlled trial was conducted in November 2015 in China. Men who have sex with men (MSM) aged 16 years or older who reported having had sexual contact without use of a condom in the preceding 3 months were recruited through a nationwide MSM website. Men were randomly allocated to one of the two arms in a 1:1 ratio using a computer algorithm and then watched one of two videos. The crowdsourced video was developed through an open contest and the social marketing video was designed by a company. Participants completed a baseline survey and follow-up surveys at 3 weeks and 3 months post-intervention. The primary outcome was incidence of sexual contact without a condom. Intention-to-treat analysis was used, with a non-inferiority margin of 10%. The trial is registered with ClinicalTrials.gov, number NCT02516930. All participants gave informed consent and the protocol was approved by Chinese (Guangdong Provincial Centre for Skin Diseases and STI Control) and American (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California San Francisco) institutional review boards. Findings1173 participants were recruited to the study; 907 (77%) completed the 3-week follow up and 791 (67%) the three-month follow up. At three weeks, 146/434 (33·6%) participants in the crowdsourced group and 153/473 (32·3%) in the social marketing group reported having sexual contact without a condom. The crowdsourced intervention achieved our pre-specified non-inferiority criterion (estimated difference: +1·3% [95%CI: 4·8–7·4]). At 3 months, 196/376 (52·1%) men in the crowdsourced group and 206/415 (49·6%) in the social-marketing group reported having sexual contact without a condom (estimated difference: +2·5% [95%CI −4·5–9·5%]). The two groups reported similar HIV testing rates and other condom-related secondary outcomes. The cost of the crowdsourcing intervention was substantially lower than the social marketing intervention (16 686 vs 26 845 USD). No adverse outcomes were reported. InterpretationCrowdsourcing could be a useful tool in China, which has a large population and government support. Crowdsourcing provides a structured system for multi-sectoral input into health policy in China. FundingUS National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID; 1R01AI114310); University of North Carolina (UNC)-South China Sexually Transmitted Disease Research Training Centre (Fogarty International Centre; 1D43TW009532); UNC Center for AIDS Research (NIAID; 5P30AI050410); University of California San Francisco Centre for AIDS Research (NIAID; P30 AI027763); US National Institute of Mental Health (R00MH093201 to CW); UNC Chapel Hill, Johns Hopkins University, Morehead School of Medicine and Tulane University (UJMT) Fogarty Fellowship (FIC R25TW0093); Doris Duke International Clinical Research Fellowship; US National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (UL1TR001111).

Comparing the effectiveness of a crowdsourced video and a social marketing video in promoting condom use among Chinese men who have sex with men: a study protocol

IntroductionCrowdsourcing has been used to spur innovation and increase community engagement in public health programmes. Crowdsourcing is the process of giving individual tasks to a large group, often involving open...

ElectriCity Innovation Challenge 2015: Experiences

ElectriCity Innovation Challenge 2015 was an open innovation contest in Gothenburg, Sweden. The main purpose was to surge public interest and involvement in ElectriCity, a demonstration arena for nextgeneration’s electrified bus systems. The contest furthermore aimed to catalyse innovation that can contribute to making public transport more attractive, and to test a novel innovation platform that assembles data from buses and bus stops. The outcome was six events with a total of more than 800 attendants, 48 viable prototypes with potential to increase the modal share of electrified public transport and feedback on the innovation platform’s potential for development.

The Politics of Leadership Selection and Party Discipline in Parliamentary Democracies

Internal party democracy and the opening up of candidate and leadership selection processes to broad selectorates tends to be seen as a normative good. However, empirical evidence regarding the consequences of political parties allowing grassroots members and non-members to participate in selecting their candidates for public office is mixed. Highly participatory candidate nomination processes have been shown to lead to less inclusive and representative legislative institutions and highly undisciplined political parties. This paper argues that the democratisation of leadership selection is likely to produce a similar effect as far as party discipline is concerned. To be successful in party primary contests, candidates for party leadership and executive positions need to move closer to the overall median voter, moving away from the median voter of their own party. Thus, the more inclusive the selectorate for party leadership selection, the more accountable the leader becomes to the wider selectorate and the more likely to neglect the ideological preferences of extreme factions among local activists and backbenchers once elected. These dynamics are likely to fuel the legislators’ use of dissent as a means of communicating their policy stances to voters. To test these expectations, a dataset containing the preferences expressed by backbenchers during the open primary contest organised by the French Socialist Party to select their 2012 presidential candidate was collected. The quantitative analysis finds evidence that the dissenting behaviour among the Socialist Party’s backbenchers during the 2012-2017 legislature followed from the ideological preferences expressed during the 2011 primary.

Crowdsourcing HIV Test Promotion Videos: A Noninferiority Randomized Controlled Trial in China.

Crowdsourcing, the process of shifting individual tasks to a large group, may enhance human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) testing interventions. We conducted a noninferiority, randomized controlled trial to compare first-time HIV testing rates among men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender individuals who received a crowdsourced or a health marketing HIV test promotion video. Seven hundred twenty-one MSM and transgender participants (≥16 years old, never before tested for HIV) were recruited through 3 Chinese MSM Web portals and randomly assigned to 1 of 2 videos. The crowdsourced video was developed using an open contest and formal transparent judging while the evidence-based health marketing video was designed by experts. Study objectives were to measure HIV test uptake within 3 weeks of watching either HIV test promotion video and cost per new HIV test and diagnosis. Overall, 624 of 721 (87%) participants from 31 provinces in 217 Chinese cities completed the study. HIV test uptake was similar between the crowdsourced arm (37% [114/307]) and the health marketing arm (35% [111/317]). The estimated difference between the interventions was 2.1% (95% confidence interval, -5.4% to 9.7%). Among those tested, 31% (69/225) reported a new HIV diagnosis. The crowdsourced intervention cost substantially less than the health marketing intervention per first-time HIV test (US$131 vs US$238 per person) and per new HIV diagnosis (US$415 vs US$799 per person). Our nationwide study demonstrates that crowdsourcing may be an effective tool for improving HIV testing messaging campaigns and could increase community engagement in health campaigns. NCT02248558.

The fascination of editing a medical journal and the nostalgic memories when departing

As of March 2016, Humberto Reyes, MD, FACP, steps down as Editor-in-Chief of Revista Médica de Chile. He joined its editorial team in 1971, as a part-time Assistant Editor. A few years later he became Associate Editor and since 1996, Editor-in-Chief. During his tenure the journal improved the peer review system and implemented a web platform to handle the editorial process, while following the recommendations established by acknowledged organizations such as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), the World Association of Medical Journal Editors (WAME) and the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). Since 2010 he represented Revista Médica de Chile as an ICMJE Member. After an open contest, the Sociedad Médica de Santiago, founder and owner of Revista Médica de Chile since 1872, elected Fernando Florenzano MD as the new Editor-in-Chief. Dr. Reyes leaves this long lasting job with the satisfaction of having conducted an institution considered among mainstream medical journals in spite of being mostly published in Spanish. Revista Médica de Chile receives a high proportion of the research articles that have been generated in the country, subsequently handled by an enthusiastic and solid editorial team whose responsibilities go far beyond selecting the material to be published since they are medical educators striving to help authors to improve their papers before having them published. Conducting this journal has been a fascinating task for this Editor as well as an unforgettable experience.

Kosovo and the Stabilization Association Agreement: Perspectives and Challenges in the Integration Process

Kosovo, as the youngest state in Europe it is also the last as a potential candidate country for membership into the EU as well as in the integration process generally. This is a consequence of many causes: first, due to lack of a status settlement for Kosovo for a long time; then, open contest with Serbia and its influence over the northern part of the country; then nonrecognition of Kosovo by five EU member states as well as due to factors such as weal rule of law, high level of corruption, nepotism, organized crime and weak economic development. However, Kosovo has entered into contractual relations with the EU and during recent years it has managed to make important steps in the integration process. One of these achievements is undoubtedly the progress of Kosovo in reaching the Stabilization Association Agreement, as an essential pre-condition in the EU membership process. In this brief study, the European integration process of Kosovo so far will be discussed, with special emphasis on the influence that the Stabilization Association Process might have in this journey. Which will be the perspective as well as challenges of Kosovo and the region in this process? To what extent will it affect the fulfilment of requirements and approximation of the country towards the EU? These are only some of the core questions we will try to answer in this policy analysis.

Incentives in Contests with Heterogeneous Solvers

In a contest in which heterogeneous solvers make effort to develop solutions, existing theories predict different outcomes about how solvers will change their effort levels as more participants compete for a prize. Specifically, one theory prescribes that when solvers are heterogeneous in their initial expertise, every solver will reduce effort with more participants due to a lower probability of winning the contest. In contrast, another theory prescribes that when solvers are heterogeneous in their costs of exerting effort, high-ability solvers raise their effort with more participants, while low-ability solvers reduce their effort; but it does not provide an explanation for such a prescription. Yet, a recent empirical study corroborates the prescription of the second theory. This paper presents a unifying model that encompasses both types of heterogeneity in solvers, and proves that the result prescribed by the second theory holds in the unifying model, suggesting that the first theory needs to be re-evaluated. Thus, we present the correct analysis of the first theory, and identify a second effect of increased competition on solvers' incentives: More solvers in a contest raise the expected best performance among other solvers, and hence solvers have positive incentives to exert higher effort to win the contest. Due to this positive effect that has been neglected in prior literature, we find that a free-entry open contest is more likely to be optimal to a contest organizer than what prior literature asserted.

Reciprocity vs. Free‐Riding in Innovation Contest Communities

Innovation contest communities are virtual tools for corporations to integrate external knowledge and creativity into the innovation process. Built on both the principle of competition and the advantages of a collaborative community, innovation contest communities constitute special interaction phenomena. The present study explores how different co‐operation behaviours, namely reciprocal giving, initial altruistic giving and free‐riding, influence the quality of participants' ideas on an open virtual contest platform with more than 2,000 members and more than 4,000 submissions. Our findings show that reciprocity and free‐riding are substantial behavioural elements of innovation contest communities leading to different outcomes regarding quality of submitted ideas. With this study, we contribute to a better theoretical understanding of distinctive types of co‐operation and free‐riding among individuals in the context of open innovation, extending theories of the evolution of co‐operation.

Determinants of Open Contest Participation in Online Labor Markets

Enabled by advances in information and communications technologies, open contests in online labor markets allow employers (individuals and companies of any size) to access a large pool of labor, thus creating an efficient alternative for sourcing labor globally with significantly lower costs compared to traditional markets. Given the importance of increasing the number of contestants in contests for labor to obtain better solutions, this paper examines the key factors that increase labor participation in open contests based on data from an online labor market. Employers benefit from more contestants since a larger pool of participants brings a more diverse set of ideas and potentially better quality solutions. We propose three categories of factors that affect participation in open contests: (1) contest design parameters (prize, duration, description length), (2) market environment factors (competition intensity and market price), and (3) project intrinsic characteristics (project complexity and project type). Our results stress the importance of market environment factors in shaping the number of participants in open contests in online labor markets beyond contest design parameters. Notably, we show that the proposed determinants are moderated by project type (ideation versus expertise), stressing the importance of distinguishing between types of projects that require different job skills. Implications for designing open contests in online labor markets are discussed.

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