Motivating participation and improving quality of contribution in ubiquitous crowdsourcing

Ubiquitous crowdsourcing, or the crowdsourcing of tasks in settings beyond the desktop, is attracting interest due to the increasing maturity of mobile and ubiquitous technology, such as smartphones and public displays. In this paper we attempt to address a fundamental challenge in ubiquitous crowdsourcing: if people can contribute to crowdsourcing anytime and anyplace, why would they choose to do so? We highlight the role of motivation in ubiquitous crowdsourcing, and its effect on participation and performance. Through a series of field studies we empirically validate various motivational approaches in the context of ubiquitous crowdsourcing, and assess the comparable advantages of ubiquitous technologies' affordances. We show that through motivation ubiquitous crowdsourcing becomes comparable to online crowdsourcing in terms of participation and task performance, and that through motivation we can elicit better quality contributions and increased participation from workers. We also show that ubiquitous technologies' contextual capabilities can increase participation through increasing workers' intrinsic motivation, and that the in-situ nature of ubiquitous technologies can increase both participation and engagement of workers. Combined, our findings provide empirically validated recommendations on the design and implementation of ubiquitous crowdsourcing.     

Gamifying collective human behavior with gameful digital rhetoric

This paper presents a design framework called Gameful Digital Rhetoric that offers a set of design frames for designing meaningful digital rhetoric that guides collective human behavior in ubiquitous social digital services, such as crowdsourcing. The framework is extracted from our experiences with building and developing crowdsourcing case studies. From a video game perspective, the paper has categorized our experiences into seven design frames to encourage collective human activity. This approach is different from traditional gamification, as it focuses more on the semiotic aspect of virtuality in the video games, not game mechanics; it helps to enhance the current meaning of the real world for changing human attitude and behavior through various socio-cultural and psychological techniques. Therefore, it is possible to discuss respective design frames for enhancing crowdsourcing by incrementally adding new digital rhetoric. The paper also presents how Gameful Digital Rhetoric allows us to guide collective human behavior in Collectivist Crowdsourcing; the design is explained through a scenario-based and experiment-based analyses. The paper then discusses how to design collective human behavior with Gameful Digital Rhetoric and how to identify the design’s potential pitfalls. Our approach offers useful insights into the design of future social digital services that influence collective human behavior     

How Well Do People Play a Quantum Prisoner’s Dilemma?

Game theory suggests quantum information processing technologies could provide useful new economic mechanisms. For example, using shared entangled quantum states can alter incentives so as to reduce the free-rider problem inherent in economic contexts such as public goods provisioning. However, game theory assumes players understand fully the consequences of manipulating quantum states and are rational. Its predictions do not always describe human behavior accurately. To evaluate the potential practicality of quantum economic mechanisms, we experimentally tested how people play the quantum version of the prisoner’s dilemma game in a laboratory setting using a simulated version of the underlying quantum physics. Even without formal training in quantum mechanics, people nearly achieve the payoffs theory predicts, but do not use mixed-strategy Nash equilibria predicted by game theory. Moreover, this correspondence with game theory for the quantum game is closer than that of the classical game.     

Fighting exclusion: a multimedia mobile app with zombies and maps as a medium for civic engagement and design

This paper presents a study on urban data crowdsourcing driven by Geo-Zombie, a multimedia mobile application we designed and developed to engage pedestrians in taking note of urban architectural impediments and facilities by documenting them through pictures and multimedia data. Geo-Zombie aims at transforming the civic activity of contributing into a virtual gamified experience where players attempt to escape from horrific situations in which zombies are ready to cannibalize unsuspecting walkers. In some sense, walkers that kill zombies deeply reconnect with the concept of imminent danger which can be fought resorting to appropriate civic actions. To challenge our initial hypotheses we conducted a design process, starting with a concept generation where three different concepts were discussed which gave rise to five different multimedia mobile apps including the one with zombies. Then, focus group, experience prototyping, application design and implementation, and finally field trials were exploited to refine the design and to select the best apps out of the five that better responded to the need of involving common people in collecting urban accessibility data. It is worth noting that the experiences of use with 50 avid walkers have demonstrated that a multimedia mobile app with maps and zombies can be a concrete step towards a social inclusion strategy while inviting new reflections and discussions on the issue of urban data crowdsourcing.     

An evaluation framework for software crowdsourcing

Recently software crowdsourcing has become an emerging area of software engineering. Few papers have presented a systematic analysis on the practices of software crowdsourcing. This paper first presents an evaluation framework to evaluate software crowdsourcing projects with respect to software quality, costs, diversity of solutions, and competition nature in crowdsourcing. Specifically, competitions are evaluated by the min-max relationship from game theory among participants where one party tries to minimize an objective function while the other party tries to maximize the same objective function. The paper then defines a game theory model to analyze the primary factors in these minmax competition rules that affect the nature of participation as well as the software quality. Finally, using the proposed evaluation framework, this paper illustrates two crowdsourcing processes, Harvard-TopCoder and AppStori. The framework demonstrates the sharp contrasts between both crowdsourcing processes as participants will have drastic behaviors in engaging these two projects.     

Civic engagement among educated Chinese youth: The role of SNS (Social Networking Services), bonding and bridging social capital

This study conducted a stratified and cluster sampling on Chinese college students (N = 654) to investigate how SNS usages and social capital elicit impact on civic engagement. The results of path regression model shows that using SNS to meet new people is positively correlated with bonding and bridging social capital in the virtual world, using SNS to contact existing friends contributes to both bonding and bridging social capital in the real world. Online bonding and bridging social capital are positively related to online civic involvement, but not significantly related to offline civic behaviors. Offline bonding and bridging social capital are positively associated with offline civic participation, but not significantly related to online civic participation. The direct effect of using SNS to meet new social ties on civic engagement is partially mediated by social capital, whilst the effect of using SNS to connect friends on civic participation is completely mediated by social capital.     

The design of civic technology: factors that influence public participation and impact

Civic technology needs to be better understood in terms of the factors that promote representative public participation and impact. This paper reports on a mixed-methods study of a civic tech platform that enabled the public to provide feedback on public transport to the service providers. The overall aim of this research was to investigate the public’s use of a leading civic tech platform, FixMyTransport. The key findings were that: an effective and easy-to-use civic technology platform enables broad participation; data and process complexity need to be removed; factual information can be captured in situ with impacts, consequences and opinions added later; emotions (if important) need to be explicitly elicited; feedback to, and a ‘conversation’ with, the users is important for engagement, as is a feeling of being part of a community. These findings can contribute to the future design of civic technology platforms.

Practitioner Summary: There is a lack of understanding of how ‘civic tech’ platforms are used and how they may be designed for maximum effectiveness. Multiple data collection methods were used to investigate a well-developed example of civic tech. Effective civic tech can enable broad democratic participation to improve public services.     

Crowdsourcing good landmarks for in-vehicle navigation systems

Augmenting navigation systems with landmarks has been posited as a method of improving the effectiveness of the technology and enhancing drivers’ engagement with the environment. However, good navigational landmarks are both laborious to collect and difficult to define. This research aimed to devise a game concept which could be played by passengers in cars, and would collect useful landmark data as a by-product. The paper describes how a virtual graffiti tagging game concept was created and tested during on-road trials with 38 participants. The data collected in the road trials were then validated using a survey, in which 100 respondents assessed the quality of the landmarks collected and their potential for reuse in navigation applications. Players of the game displayed a consensus in choosing where to place their graffiti tags, with over 30% of players selecting the same object to tag in 10 of the 12 locations. Furthermore, significant correlation was found between how highly landmarks were rated in the survey and how frequently they were tagged during the game. The research provides evidence that using crowdsourcing games to collect landmarks does not require large numbers of people, or extensive coverage of an area, to produce suitable candidate landmarks for navigation.     

Perceptions of virtual reward systems in crowdsourcing games

The gaming approach to crowdsourcing is a major way to foster engagement and sustained participation. Also known as crowdsourcing games, players contribute their effort to tackle problems and receive enjoyment in return. As in any game, a fundamental mechanism in crowdsourcing games is its virtual reward system. This paper investigates how virtual reward systems evoke intrinsic motivation, perceived enjoyment and output quality in the context of crowdsourcing games. Three mobile applications for crowdsourcing location-based content were developed for an experimental study. The Track version offered a points-based reward system for actions such as contribution of content. The Badge version offered different badges for collection while the Share version served as a control which did not have any virtual reward system. For each application, participants performed a series of tasks after which a questionnaire survey was administered. Results showed that Badge and Track enhanced enjoyment emotionally, cognitively and behaviorally. They also increased perceptions of the quality of outputs when compared to Share. As well, they better satisfied the motivational needs for autonomy and competence than Share. Interestingly, there were also significant differences in how Badge and Track were perceived.     

Ethical norms and issues in crowdsourcing practices: A Habermasian analysis

Crowdsourcing practices have generated much discussion on their ethics and fairness, yet these topics have received little scholarly investigation. Some have criticized crowdsourcing for worker exploitation and for undermining workplace regulations. Others have lauded crowdsourcing for enabling workers' autonomy and allowing disadvantaged people to access previously unreachable job markets. In this paper, we examine the ethics in crowdsourcing practices by focusing on three questions: (a) What ethical issues exist in crowdsourcing practices? (b) are ethical norms emerging or are issues emerging that require ethical norms? and, more generally, (c) how can the ethics of crowdsourcing practices be established? We answer these questions by engaging with Jürgen Habermas' discourse ethics theory to interpret findings from a longitudinal field study (from 2013 to 2016) involving key crowdsourcing participants (workers, platform organizers, and requesters) of three crowdsourcing communities. Grounded in this empirical study, we identify ethical concerns and discuss the ones for which ethical norms have emerged as well as others which remain unresolved and problematic in crowdsourcing practices. Furthermore, we provide normative considerations of how ethical concerns can be identified, discussed, and resolved based on the principles of discourse ethics.     

Solvers’ participation in crowdsourcing platforms: Examining the impacts of trust,and benefit and cost factors

Organizations are increasingly crowdsourcing their tasks to unknown individual workers, i.e., solvers. Solvers' participation is critical to the success of crowdsourcing activities. However, challenges exist in attracting solvers to participate in crowdsourcing. In this regard, prior research has mainly investigated the influences of benefit factors on solvers’ intention to participate in crowdsourcing. Thus, there is a lack of understanding of the cost factors that influence actual participation behavior, in conjunction with the benefits. Additionally, the role of trust in the cost-benefit analysis remains to be explored. Motivated thus, based on social exchange theory and context-related literature, we develop a model to explain the impacts of benefit and cost factors as well as trust on solver participation behavior in crowdsourcing. The model was tested using survey and archival data from 156 solvers on a large crowdsourcing platform. As hypothesized, monetary reward, skill enhancement, work autonomy, enjoyment, and trust were found to positively affect solvers’ participation in crowdsourcing, while cognitive effort negatively affects their participation. In addition, it was found that monetary reward positively affects trust (trust partially mediates its effect on participation behavior), while loss of knowledge power negatively affects trust. The theoretical contributions and practical implications of the study are discussed.     

Designing in between Local Government and the Public – Using Institutional Analysis in Interventions on Civic Infrastructures

Adapting and changing the systems and technologies involved in civic engagement with local government is among the key challenges of collaborative technologies for political participation. In such contexts, both existing sets of technologies and ingrained, often formalised practices, the ‘rules of the game’, constrain any opportunity for intervention. Additionally, ‘civic’ and expert groups with conflicting agendas and divergent demands on public choices assert their influence in these transformation programmes. The article argues that established methods in collaborative systems design have thus far overlooked the role of recurring actions involved in public participation as well as the formal rules and ingrained practices that construct them. Yet, such patterns present a valuable resource for design interventions. Thus, based on an institutional approach, the article outlines a methodology for requirement gathering by mapping the relations of actors, software and their use along identifiable action situations. The method called for a dialogue between socio-technical-spatial contexts of public service and specific actions taking place within it. Drawing on a case of organising civic engagement in urban planning, the article discusses how to find and trace existing practices across social settings, information technologies and material contexts where engagements take place. The approach underscores the existing institutional contexts in inspiring, opening and constraining the opportunities to support ‘civics’.     

软件众包参与度影响因素分析及预测模型

随着"众包"这种商业模式的快速发展, 越来越多的互联网公司选择以"众包"的形式发布软件任务. 然而, 软件任务因其高门槛、高复杂度、长周期等特性, 面临着严重的低参与度问题. 本文结合全球最大的软件众包平台TopCoder的数据, 对软件众包任务的参与度进行研究. 首先, 使用多元回归分析了影响软件众包参与度的因素; 接着, 综合数据挖掘领域的多种分类预测算法, 探讨软件众包参与度的预测模型. 希望通过本实证研究, 为发包方、众包平台降低软件众包的低参与风险提供参考.     

An impactful crowdsourcing intermediary design - a case of a service imagery crowdsourcing system

Crowdsourcing is usually implemented using an intermediary organization or directly coordinated by solution seekers. For those using an IT-based crowdsourcing intermediary, the important factors of intermediaries that impact the crowdsourcing outcome are yet unclear. In addition, little research was conducted on how to design a crowdsourcing intermediary that can address the combined challenges of considering different cognitive demand levels of solution providers’ contributions, combining contributions and evaluating contributions. This paper identifies three important factors and provides a novel design of crowdsourcing intermediary to cope with these challenges. This study uses a case that focuses on how to assist small and medium businesses (SMBs) to develop their service imageries in triggering service innovation and designing their service experiences as to fulfill the desired outcomes of customers. Through the case, the benefits of our crowdsourcing intermediary design are demonstrated and justified. The three important factors are the crowdsourcing intermediary knowledge base, generative networks and empowerment of crowd members. This study shows that the crowdsourcing process can facilitate achieving a higher chance of attaining creative solutions for SMBs’ innovation problems when the three factors are well incorporated and managed within the crowdsourcing intermediary design. This study also presents a novel design of crowdsourcing intermediary that can address the combined challenges of coping with different cognitive demand levels of crowd members and combining and evaluating crowd members’ contributions, in order to attain impactful crowdsourcing outcome.     

Using game mechanics for field evaluation of prototype social applications: a novel methodology

This paper describes a novel methodology to evaluate a social media application in its formative phase of design. Taking advantage of the experiences developed in the Alternate Reality Games, we propose to insert game mechanics in the test setting of a formative evaluation of a prototypical social system. As a use case, we present the evaluation of WantEat, a prototypical social mobile application in the gastronomical domain. The evaluation highlighted how the gami?cation of a field trial can yield good results when evaluating social applications in prototypical status. From a methodological point of view, gamifying a field trial overcomes the cold start problem, caused by the absence of active communities, which can prevent the participation of users and therefore the collection of reliable data. Our experience showed that the gamification of a field evaluation is feasible and can likely increase the quantity of both browsing actions and social actions performed by users. Based on these results, we then are able to provide a set of guidelines to gamify the evaluation session of an interactive system.     

Time,engagement and video games: How game design elements shape the temporalities of play in massively multiplayer online role-playing games

Researchers and developers constantly seek novel ways to create engaging applications that are able to retain their users over the long term, make them desire to spend time using the application or go back to using it after a break. With this aim, video games can be an insightful source of inspiration, as they are specifically designed to maximise playing time, increase players' intentions of playing during the day or enhance their willingness to replay. In a gaming context, ‘time’ is an important factor for engagement because game designers can design the game time to retain players in the game environment. Drawing on social practice theory, which is increasingly used in Information Systems (IS) research, I conducted an ethnographic study in World of Warcraft (WoW) to understand how various temporalities are produced within a video game and the effects that they have on players' engagement. The findings show that game temporalities stem from the complex interaction between the design features of the game and the norms, routines and expectations that are part of the game practices. Moreover, these temporalities can engender temporal experiences that may stimulate engagement in various ways. The study contributes to IS literature by proposing a novel understanding of how time can be intentionally designed to sustain user engagement. Finally, it suggests that ‘time design’ in video games could inspire designs in broader IS contexts, such as in the gamification of online communities, crowdsourcing platforms and crowd working systems.     

Evaluating the impact of a cloud-based serious game on obese people

This paper describes the process of monitoring obese people through a cloud-based serious game that promotes them to engage in physical exercises in a playful manner. The monitoring process focuses on obtaining various health and exercise-related parameters of obese during game-play, such as heart rate, weight, step count and calorie burn, which contributes to their weight loss. While the obese are engaged in the game session, therapists/caregivers can access their health data anytime, anywhere and from any device to change the game complexity level and accordingly provide on the spot recommendation. In our study, we evaluate how the different physical activities performed through this game impact their cognitive behavior in terms of attention, relevance, confidence and satisfaction. The evaluation was based on the participation of 150 undergraduate obese and overweight students who were asked to play the game and fill a questionnaire after game-play. The data analysis conducted on their feedback showed that they were self-aware and motivated to play the game for weight loss.     

The Motivational Fabric of Gamified Idea Competitions: The Evaluation of Game Mechanics from a Longitudinal Perspective

Idea competitions are a highly important tool for integrating insiders and outsiders in the idea generation and evaluation activities of organizations. Previous research on motives for participation has demonstrated that organizers need to design idea competitions that create a positive experience for participants. To address this challenge, organizations have started to include games mechanics (e.g., points, levels, badges) into idea competitions, a measure that has been termed gamification. However, there is a lack of scientific studies focusing on the longitudinal evaluation and perception of game mechanics. This study thus evaluates game mechanics in a gamified idea competition through two independent panel studies. The quantitative results are complemented with data from qualitative surveys. The findings of this study indicate that there are differences in game mechanics with respect to their motivational evaluation, and that game mechanics with reference to social aspects in particular are more highly appreciated.     

Local Groups Online: Political Learning and Participation

Voluntary associations serve crucial roles in local communities and within our larger democratic society. They aggregate shared interests, collective will, and cultivate civic competencies that nurture democratic participation. People active in multiple local groups frequently act as opinion leaders and create “weak” social ties across groups. In Blacksburg and surrounding Montgomery County, Virginia, the Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) community computer network has helped to foster nearly universal Internet penetration. Set in this dense Internet context, the present study investigated if and how personal affiliation with local groups enhanced political participation in this high information and communication technology environment. This paper presents findings from longitudinal survey data that indicate as individuals’ uses of information technology within local formal groups increases over time, so do their levels and types of involvement in the group. Furthermore, these increases most often appear among people who serve as opinion leaders and maintain weak social ties in their communities. Individuals’ changes in community participation, interests and activities, and Internet use suggest ways in which group members act upon political motivations and interests across various group types.      

面向众包数据清洗的主动学习技术

传统方法多数采用机器学习算法对数据进行清洗.这些方法虽然能够解决部分问题,但存在计算难度大、缺乏充足的知识等局限性.近年来,随着众包平台的兴起,越来越多的研究将众包引入数据清洗过程,通过众包来提供机器学习所需要的知识.由于众包的有偿性,研究如何将机器学习算法与众包有效且低成本结合在一起是必要的.提出了两种支持基于众包的数据清洗的主动学习模型,通过主动学习技术来减少众包开销,实现了对给定的数据集基于真实众包平台的数据清洗,最大程度减少成本的同时提高了数据的质量.在真实数据集上的实验结果验证了所提模型的有效性.