Showing papers on "Crowdsourcing published in 2008"

Crowdsourcing user studies with Mechanical Turk

Abstract: User studies are important for many aspects of the design process and involve techniques ranging from informal surveys to rigorous laboratory studies. However, the costs involved in engaging users often requires practitioners to trade off between sample size, time requirements, and monetary costs. Micro-task markets, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, offer a potential paradigm for engaging a large number of users for low time and monetary costs. Here we investigate the utility of a micro-task market for collecting user measurements, and discuss design considerations for developing remote micro user evaluation tasks. Although micro-task markets have great potential for rapidly collecting user measurements at low costs, we found that special care is needed in formulating tasks in order to harness the capabilities of the approach.

Crowdsourcing as a Model for Problem Solving : An Introduction and Cases

Abstract: Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem-solving and production model that has emerged in recent years. Notable examples of the model include Threadless, iStockphoto, InnoCentive, the Goldcorp Challenge, and user-generated advertising contests. This article provides an introduction to crowdsourcing, both its theoretical grounding and exemplar cases, taking care to distinguish crowdsourcing from open source production. This article also explores the possibilities for the model, its potential to exploit a crowd of innovators, and its potential for use beyond forprofit sectors. Finally, this article proposes an agenda for research into crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business

Abstract: The amount of knowledge and talent dispersed among the human race has always outstripped our capacity to harness it Crowdsourcing corrects thatbut in doing so, it also unleashes the forces of creative destruction From CrowdsourcingFirst identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, crowdsourcing describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wiseits talented, creative, and stunningly productive Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of todays technology, liberating the latent potential within us all Its a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter; the quality of work is all that counts; and every field is open to people of every imaginable background If you can perform the service, design the product, or solve the problem, youve got the jobBut crowdsourcing has also triggered a dramatic shift in the way work is organized, talent is employed, research is conducted, and products are made and marketed As the crowd comes to supplant traditional forms of labor, pain and disruption are inevitable Jeff Howe delves into both the positive and negative consequences of this intriguing phenomenon Through extensive reporting from the front lines of this revolution, he employs a brilliant array of stories to look at the economic, cultural, business, and political implications of crowdsourcing How were a bunch of part-time dabblers in finance able to help an investment company consistently beat the market? Why does Procter & Gamble repeatedly call on enthusiastic amateurs to solve scientific and technical challenges? How can companies as diverse as iStockphoto and Threadless employ just a handful of people, yet generate millions of dollars in revenue every year? The answers lie within these pages The blueprint for crowdsourcing originated from a handful of computer programmers who showed that a community of like-minded peers could create better products than a corporate behemoth like Microsoft Jeff Howe tracks the amazing migration of this new model of production, showing the potential of the Internet to create human networks that can divvy up and make quick work of otherwise overwhelming tasks One of the most intriguing ideas of Crowdsourcing is that the knowledge to solve intractable problemsa cure for cancer, for instancemay already exist within the warp and weave of this infinite and, as yet, largely untapped resource But first, Howe proposes, we need to banish preconceived notions of how such problems are solved The very concept of crowdsourcing stands at odds with centuries of practice Yet, for the digital natives soon to enter the workforce, the technologies and principles behind crowdsourcing are perfectly intuitive This generation collaborates, shares, remixes, and creates with a fluency and ease the rest of us can hardly understand Crowdsourcing, just now starting to emerge, will in a short time simply be the way things are done

Un(der)paid Innovators: The Commercial Utiliza- tion of Consumer Work through Crowdsourcing

Abstract: This paper investigates the phenomena of "crowdsourcing", or the outsourcing of tasks to the general internet public. This phenomenon was made possible by technological innovations associated with "Web 2.0" but is evidence of historically significant change in the relations between firms and their customers. We are witnessing the emergence of a new consumer type: the "working consumer". In the conventional role, consumers were passive “kings” to be waited upon. Consumers now are becoming more like co-workers who take over specific parts of a production process, whereby this process ultimately remains under the control of a commercial enterprise. This article seeks a more precise definition of crowdsourcing, catalogues some of its forms, and differentiates them from peripherally related phenomena. It ends with a discussion regarding potential consequences (negative and positive) of crowdsourcing for the future organization of work.

Outsourcing to an unknown workforce: exploring opensourcing as a global sourcing strategy

Abstract: This paper presents a psychological contract perspective on the use of the open source development model as a global sourcing strategy-opensourcing, as we term it here-whereby commercial companies and open source communities collaborate on development of software of commercial interest to the company. Building on previous research on information systems outsourcing, a theoretical framework for exploring the opensourcing phenomenon is derived. The first phase of the research concerned qualitative case studies involving three commercial organizations (IONA Technologies, Philips Medical Systems, and Telefonica) that had "liberated" what had hitherto been proprietary software and sought to grow a global open source community around their product. We followed this with a large-scale survey involving additional exemplars of the phenomenon. The study identifies a number of symmetrical and complementary customer and community obligations that are associated with opensourcing success. We also identify a number of tension points on which customer and community perceptions tend to vary. Overall the key watchwords for opensourcing are openness, trust, tact, professionalism, transparency, and complementariness: The customer and community need to establish a trusted partnership of shared responsibility in building an overall opensourcing ecosystem. The study reveals an ongoing shift from OSS as a community of individual developers to OSS as a community of commercial organizations, primarily small to medium-sized enterprises. It also reveals that opensourcing provides ample opportunity for companies to headhunt top developers, hence moving from outsourcing to a largely unknown OSS workforce toward recruitment of developers from a global open source community whose talents have become known as a result of the opensourcing experience.

Crowdsourcing for relevance evaluation

Abstract: Relevance evaluation is an essential part of the development and maintenance of information retrieval systems. Yet traditional evaluation approaches have several limitations; in particular, conducting new editorial evaluations of a search system can be very expensive. We describe a new approach to evaluation called TERC, based on the crowdsourcing paradigm, in which many online users, drawn from a large community, each performs a small evaluation task.

Moving the crowd at iStockphoto: The composition of the crowd and motivations for participation in a crowdsourcing application

Abstract: Crowdsourcing is an online, distributed problem solving and production model already in use by for-profit organizations such as Threadless, iStockphoto, and InnoCentive. Speculation in Weblogs and wisdom of crowds theory assumes a diverse crowd engaged in crowdsourcing labor. Furthermore, and as crowdsourcing is in some ways similar to open source software production, prior research suggests that individuals in the crowd likely participate in crowdsourcing ventures to gain peer recognition and to develop creative skills. The present study tests these assumptions in the crowdsourcing community at iStockphoto. An online survey obtained 651 responses from iStockers to demographic and motivations questions. Results indicate that the desire to make money, develop individual skills, and to have fun were the strongest motivators for participation at iStockphoto, and that the crowd at iStockphoto is quite homogenous and elite. These data have implications for future research into crowdsourcing, particularly regarding notions of professionalism and investment in online communities.

Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity

Abstract: The tragedy of the digital commons does not prevent the copious voluntary production of content that one witnesses in the web. We show through an analysis of a massive data set from YouTube that the productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention, measured by the number of downloads. Conversely, a lack of attention leads to a decrease in the number of videos uploaded and the consequent drop in productivity, which in many cases asymptotes to no uploads whatsoever. Moreover, uploaders compare themselves to others when having low productivity and to themselves when exceeding a threshold.

Un(der)paid innovators: the commercial utilization of consumer work through crowdsourcing

Abstract: This paper investigates the phenomena of "crowdsourcing", or the outsourcing of tasks to the general internet public. This phenomenon was made possible by technological innovations associated with "Web 2.0" but is evidence of historically significant change in the relations between firms and their customers. We are witnessing the emergence of a new consumer type: the "working consumer". In the conventional role, consumers were passive “kings” to be waited upon. Consumers now are becoming more like co-workers who take over specific parts of a production process, whereby this process ultimately remains under the control of a commercial enterprise. This article seeks a more precise definition of crowdsourcing, catalogues some of its forms, and differentiates them from peripherally related phenomena. It ends with a discussion regarding potential consequences (negative and positive) of crowdsourcing for the future organization of work.

Crowdsourcing and knowledge sharing: strategic user behavior on taskcn

Abstract: Witkeys are a thriving type of web-based knowledge sharing market in China, supporting a form of crowdsourcing. In a Witkey site, users offer a small award for a solution to a task, and other users compete to have their solution selected.In this paper, we examine the behavior of users on one of the biggest Witkey websites in China, Taskcn.com. On Taskcn, we observed several characteristics in users' activity over time. Most users become inactive after only a few submissions. Others keep attempting tasks. Over time, users tend to select tasks where they are competing against fewer opponents to increase their chances of winning. They will also, perhaps counterproductively, select tasks with higher expected rewards. Yet, on average, they do not increase their chances of winning, and in some categories of tasks, their chances actually decrease. This does not paint the full picture, however, because there is a very small core of successful users who manage not only to win multiple tasks, but to increase their win-to-submission ratio over time. This core group proposes nearly 20% of the winning solutions on the site. The patterns we observe on Taskcn, we believe, hold clues to the future of crowdsourcing and freelance marketplaces, and raise interesting design implications for such sites.

Personalization via friendsourcing

Abstract: When information is known only to friends in a social network, traditional crowdsourcing mechanisms struggle to motivate a large enough user population and to ensure accuracy of the collected information. We thus introduce friendsourcing, a form of crowdsourcing aimed at collecting accurate information available only to a small, socially-connected group of individuals. Our approach to friendsourcing is to design socially enjoyable interactions that produce the desired information as a side effect.We focus our analysis around Collabio, a novel social tagging game that we developed to encourage friends to tag one another within an online social network. Collabio encourages friends, family, and colleagues to generate useful information about each other. We describe the design space of incentives in social tagging games and evaluate our choices by a combination of usage log analysis and survey data. Data acquired via Collabio is typically accurate and augments tags that could have been found on Facebook or the Web. To complete the arc from data collection to application, we produce a trio of prototype applications to demonstrate how Collabio tags could be utilized: an aggregate tag cloud visualization, a personalized RSS feed, and a question and answer system. The social data powering these applications enables them to address needs previously difficult to support, such as question answering for topics comprehensible only to a few of a user's friends.

Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds: Designing an IT-Supported Ideas Competition for an ERP Software Company

Abstract: "Crowdsourcing" is currently one of the most discussed key words within the open innovation community. The major question for both research and business is how to find and lever the enormous potential of the "collective brain". This research in progress paper provides an approach for finding and leveraging innovations for an ERP software company among its user base. This is done by designing an IT-supported ideas competition within the SAP UCC (University Competence Center) User Group to use the potentials of the collective intelligence of this crowd. The German SAP UCC User Group consists of about 60,000 people (lecturers and students) using SAP software for educational purposes. The practical problem is twofold: On the one hand, there is not much activity yet in this community. On the other hand, SAP has not tried to systematically address this highly educated group for idea generation or innovation development so far. Therefore, the objective of this research is to generate innovations, process and product ideas for SAP Research and Development through an IT-supported ideas competition among the SAP UCC Community. Furthermore, the concept aims at providing an interface to SAP Human Resources processes in order to identify the most promising students in this VC This paper follows an action research approach. It is focusing on the diagnosing and action planning phase to develop an integrated concept of the ideas competition within the VC.

How to invent a new business model based on crowdsourcing: The crowdspirit ® case

Abstract: Chesbrough's work on open innovation provides a theoretical framework to understand how firms can access external knowledge in order to support their RD (2) The value creation process related to profiles of crowdspirit community of contributors (3) The challenging of the company's initial business model and (4) The creation of a new business model successively open and closed models. In the discussion we summarize the main strategic issues that emerged during the work on Crowdspirit's strategy with its managers, and interpret them on the basis of existing literature on open innovation. This leads us to complete Chesbrough's open innovation approach and Nambissan and Sawney network-centric innovation model by introducing new options for companies whose strategy is based on crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing and Attention

Abstract: In the age of the Web, social attention and its swift allocation through vast social networks play a central role in the generation, dissemination, and validation of ideas and results within large communities. This growing trend is likely to become dominant because of the ease with which people can now contribute to the global chatter. We're witnessing an inversion of the traditional way in which people have generated and consumed content. From photography to news to encyclopedic knowledge, in a centuries-old pattern, relatively few people and organizations produced content for consumption by everyone else. With the advent of the Web and the ease of migrating content to it, that pattern has reversed. Today, millions of people create content in the form of blogs, wikis, videos, music, and so on, and few can attend to it all. This phenomenon, known as crowdsourcing, is exemplified by Web sites such as Digg, Flickr, YouTube, and Wikipedia, which produce sought-after content rivaling the best published sources without traditional quality filters.

Collaborative Shopping Networks: Sharing the Wisdom of Crowds in E-Commerce Environments

Abstract: Social web services have gained enormous popularity over the past years because of a steadily increasing demand for user participation in the whole web sphere. Social networks like MySpace or Facebook and media sites like Flickr or YouTube clearly demonstrate the variety and functionality of social sites. Significantly affected by this trend, online retail and e-commerce environments rapidly changed within the last years. Users were integrated into existing e-shops and mutated from simple buyers to fully integrated customers. Thus, a modern shop visitor can recommend products, leave comments, rate vendors or publish wish lists. This recent phenomenon, called social commerce or social shopping, leads to more customer satisfaction, user participation and social interaction. Accordingly, there is a strong demand for innovative social commerce models and concepts like crowdsourcing, consumer generated content or live shopping. This paper shows the results of an extended analysis of collaborative shopping networks and demonstrates the development of a representative interaction model. An evaluation of social commerce models gave insights into functionalities, interactions and entities of successful social web applications. To create a collaborative shopping network model, conventional web services as well as selected best practice cases were analyzed in detail. To meet the demands of modern consumers, success factors are presented in the final part.

Crowdsourcing as a way to access external knowledge for innovation

Abstract: This paper focuses on “crowdsourcing” as a significant trend in the new paradigm of open innovation (Chesbrough 2006; Chesbrough & Appleyard 2007). Crowdsourcing conveys the idea of opening the R&D processes to “the crowd” through a web 2.0 infrastructure. Based on two cases studies of crowdsourcing webstartups (Wilogo and CrowdSpirit), the paper aims to build a framework to characterize and interpret the tension between value creation by a community and value capture by a private economic actor. Contributing to the discussions on “hybrid organizational forms” in organizational studies (Bruce & Jordan 2007), the analysis examines how theses new models combine various forms of relationships and exchanges (market or non market). It describes how crowdsourcing conveys new patterns of control, incentives and co-ordination mechanisms.

Crowdsourcing, Attention and Productivity

Abstract: The tragedy of the digital commons does not prevent the copious voluntary production of content that one witnesses in the web. We show through an analysis of a massive data set from \texttt{YouTube} that the productivity exhibited in crowdsourcing exhibits a strong positive dependence on attention, measured by the number of downloads. Conversely, a lack of attention leads to a decrease in the number of videos uploaded and the consequent drop in productivity, which in many cases asymptotes to no uploads whatsoever. Moreover, uploaders compare themselves to others when having low productivity and to themselves when exceeding a threshold.

Outsourcing to an unknown workforce

Abstract: This paper presents a psychological contract perspective on the use of the open source development model as a global sourcing strategy-opensourcing, as we term it here-whereby commercial companies ...

Chemistry Crowdsourcing and Open Notebook Science

Abstract: This is a pre-proposal written for the NSF program CDI (Cyber-Enabled Discovery and Innovation) in Jan 2008.The current system of dissemination of scientific data and knowledge is far less efficient than it needs to be to facilitate improved collaborative science, especially considering current publication vehicles and infrastructure. There is a growing movement promoting more Open Science with the belief that a more transparent scientific process can perform far more effectively. The logical extension of this concept is full transparency - exposing a researcher's complete record of progress to the public in near real time. Not only will such a process enable ongoing data sharing it also provides an opportunity to develop collaborative communities of scientists and, at the conclusion of data acquisition, can enable communal extraction of conclusions when necessary. We have named this approach Open Notebook Science and have demonstrated its implementation and feasibility with the UsefulChem project, started in the summer of 2005, with the aim of synthesizing novel anti-malarial compounds. Our system currently uses free hosted services using general blog and wiki functions to facilitate replication across any scientific domains. These services are not chemically intelligent and are limited to text and graphic based data sharing only. For Open Notebook Chemistry the ability to intelligently manipulate, manage and search chemical structures and associated data is necessary and we have demonstrated proof of concept capabilities by integrating with the ChemSpider service, a free access online database managing chemical structures and focused on developing a structure centric community for chemists. This work will require the development of a chemically intelligent software platform to extend the capabilities of both the blog and the wiki environment for managing Open Notebook Science. The exposure of raw experimental procedures and data in a semantically rich format will enable the participation of both human and autonomous agents in the process of scientific discovery. This phenomenon of spontaneous group intelligence, referred to as "Crowdsourcing", has proven valuable in several contexts. Already, productive collaborations have been forged within the UsefulChem project with groups from Indiana University, Nanyang Technological University, the National Cancer Institute and UC San Francisco.

Mobile Social Software for Cultural Heritage: A Reference Model.

Abstract: Web 2.0, also known as the Social Web, marks a new philosophy where users are both the main actors and the content producers: users write blogs and comments, they tag, link, and upload photos, pictures, videos, and podcasts. As a step further, Mobile 2.0 adapts Web 2.0 technology to mobile users. We intend to study how Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 together can be applied to the cultural heritage sector. Recently, a number of cultural institutions and museums are introducing in their projects some Web 2.0 applications, but the main knowledge source remains a small group of a few experts. Our approach is different: we plan to let all the users, the crowd, to be the main contents provider. We aim to the crowdsourcing, the long tail power, as fuel of cultural heritage system. In this paper, we propose a reference model for cultural heritage system that lets users create, share, and use cultural contents including mobile context-aware features.

Portalis: using competitive online interactions to support aid initiatives for the homeless

Abstract: We designed a web-based system with game-like properties that utilizes crowdsourcing to facilitate the beneficial transfer-of-knowledge to case managers (CMs) working with the homeless. This has two significant impacts: First, Portalis allows CMs to make informed decisions in managing client cases. Second, it enables individuals who would like to volunteer their services but are limited by time constraints to contribute.

Social Media 100 Success Secrets: Social Media, Web 2.0 User-Generated Content and Virtual Communities - 100 Most Asked Mass Collaboration Questions

Abstract: Social media can take many different forms, including Internet forums, weblogs, wikis, podcasts, pictures and video. Technologies include: blogs, picture-sharing, vlogs, wall-postings, email, instant messaging, music-sharing, crowdsourcing, and voice over IP, to name a few. This terrific exploration of Social Media shows how organizations are communicating directly with important constituents. And it's done with real word examples, not theory. In the past, marketers could try all kinds of expensive advertising to get the word out to new buyers, with little to show for the investment. These are companies where the existing customers love the products, but the media doesn't seem to care. Many people are saying that big budget marketing and PR programs just aren't working anymore so they are asking: "How do you get noticed in a crowded marketplace?" This book shows the power of online thought leadership and communicating to people directly without the advertising and media filter. Imagine if people learn about you on the Web first, so when they decide to contact you, the sale is already partly done, That's the power of online thought leadership. This book shows you how to harness the power the Web.

How to Attract Customers to Innovate in an Online Community Maintained by a Company

Abstract: Online communities and Web 2.0 are hot topics today in media as well as in consumers’ discussions. The challenge of company online communities is to support the creativity of its members. These online communities aimed for customer innovation are called innovation communities. To be able to build and manage innovation communities companies need more knowledge about the motivational factors of customers. This study focuses on how to attract customers to participate in an innovation community. Case study conducted in Owela innovation community showed that interesting objectives of innovation, creating open and trustworthy atmosphere as well as supporting community with appropriate tools are important factors in attracting customer to participate in the activities.

m-Dvara 2.0: Mobile & Web 2.0 Services Integration for Cultural Heritage

Abstract: Web 2.0 marks a new philosophy where user is the main actor and content producer: users write blogs and comments, they tag, link, and upload photos, pictures, videos, and podcasts. As a step further, Mobile 2.0 adapts Web 2.0 technology to mobile users. We intend to study how Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0 together can be applied to the cultural heritage sector. A number of cultural institutions and museums are introducing in their projects some Web 2.0 applications, but the main knowledge source remains a small group of a few experts. Our approach is dierent: we plan to let all the users, the crowd, to be the main contents provider. We aim to the crowdsourcing, the long tail power, as we call fuel of cultural heritage system. In this paper, we describe the m-Dvara 2.0 project, whose aim is a system that lets users to create, share, and use cultural contents including mobile context-aware features.

Developing trends and challenges for the information industry examined in the context of the Online Information Conference

Abstract: Using the development of the annual Online Information conference as a touchstone, this paper examines emerging trends in the information industry that are likely to be of interest to information professionals during 2008. These include web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, social networking, semantic web, risk management, user-generated content, universal search, crowdsourcing and new roles for information professionals

WeDesign: A Forum-Based Tool for Managing User-Generated Content in Engineering Design and Product Development

Abstract: A web forum-based tool for managing user-generated content in engineering design and product development is described. The system is intended to allow a “crowdsourcing” approach, in which large groups perform the work more commonly by individuals. User tests are conducted with an initial implementation, with the system configured in control and “parliamentary” modes. This experiment is done in the setting of a mechanical engineering senior capstone design course. The parliamentary mode is intended to encourage discussion and negotiation among participants, and allows them to design their own work processes. Review of the designs produced together with responses to a survey indicate the system was favorably received, and allowed a group to generate and select concept designs. Future research directions are suggested.Copyright © 2008 by ASME

Open innovation across the prosperity gap: an essay on getting the Caucasus back into the European innovation society.

Abstract: The paper shows how both intra-national and international strategies of open innovation and crowdsourcing could be used to reduce or even invert the brain drain of Caucasian societies, leading to more sustainable and, above all, local returns on investment in the region s excellent educational infrastructure.