When to ask for help:Evaluating Projects for Crowdsourcing

Peter OrganisciakUniversity of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Is it a task that befits a crowd?

How do you entice that crowd to care?

Jeff Howe, 2008

“We know crowdsourcing exists because we've observed it in the wild. However, it's proven difficult to breed in captivity.”

SAMPLING

300 sitestop labeled ‘crowdsourcing’ links

idea exchange

knowledge aggregation

skills aggregation

opinion aggregation

creation

encoding

gaming

group power

whimsy

platform

financial

Encoding

Perception-based tasks

Utilizing human capacities for abstraction and reasoning

Digitalkoot, http://www.digitalkoot.fi

Transcribe Bentham, http://www.transcribe-bentham.da.ulcc.ac.uk

Knowledge aggregation

Projects that utilize what people know, whether facts or experiences.

skills aggregation

Primary motivators • interest in the topic• ease of entry and of participation• altruism and meaningful contribution• sincerity• appeal to knowledge• money

Money

“Interest precedes creativity. You want to participate in this community, then you’ll end up contributing.”

– Interview participant on Star Wars Uncut, a crowdsourced refilming of Star Wars

Interest in the Topic

Ease of entry / Ease of Participation

Altruism and Meaningful Contribution

“We appear to have tapped into the Web community’s altruistic substratum by asking people for help. … People wanted to participate and liked being asked to contribute.” –On Flickr Commons. (Springer, et al. 2008)

Appeal to Knowledge / Opinions

Sincerity

Not dependent on the product, but rather on the managers

“Wanting things to be right! It’s part of the editor brain I have. When you’re reading a newspaper and you see a mistake you can’t fix it… Here you can. “ - Interview participant explaining their participation in Wikipedia

Secondary motivators

• Indicators of progress and reputation (“cred”)

• Utility• Fun• System feedback• Social networking• Fixed windows

Cred

System feedback

conclusions

THANK YOU

Lisa GivenGeoffrey RockwellStan Ruecker

Acknowledgements