Crowdsourcing: Barriers to participation

With the advances in internet technologies and the emergence of crowdsourcing, organizations are now increasingly looking outside their boundaries for solving problems. Yet, the success of crowdsourcing processes depends on the sustained participation of crowdsourcing individuals. Previous studies have mainly focused on understanding individuals' initial motivation for participation with few focusing on the factors that affect individuals' sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. None of these studies examined how collaboration affects individuals' participation behavior in crowdsourcing contests. This study attempts to understand how individuals' collaboration (in the form of comments and votes) affects their sustained participation in online problem solving contests. This study uses data from the Kaggle website that holds online data science competitions in which individuals submit their proposed solutions with the best solutions being rewarded. Our results show that individuals who receive more attention from other members tend to come back and maintain their participation in the platform.

Eludamos: Journal for Computer Game Culture, 2020

Since its very first appearance the concept of crowdsourcing has undergone major variations, coming to include highly heterogeneous phenomena such as Google’s data mining, exchanges on sharing economy platforms (e.g. Airbnb or eBay), contents production within creative communities online (e.g. Wikipedia) and much more. If one assumes a very broad perspective, it is eventually possible to extend the category of crowdsourcing to cover whatsoever phenomena involving the participation of the crowd online, as in fact has been done. On the contrary, I will argue that crowdsourcing – and in particular its microwork branch – represents the specific practice of extending outsourcing processes to a large, low-cost, scalable and flexible workforce, in order to generate greater added value for a supply chain. To develop this analysis, I will especially focus on the case of Amazon Mechanical Turk, and on how the operations carried out on this platform are primarily intended to manage the huge fl...

2017

While crowdsourcing is increasingly used for data gathering and problem solving, the power relations in crowdsourced processes remain largely unexamined. Especially in crowdsourced public policymaking, an understanding of these processes is essential for verifying the data. For understanding the social processes behind the data and designing crowdsourcing technologies and processes suitable for public policymaking, it is important to understand power structures and relations within the crowd and between the crowd and the sourcer: Who has the power, what is being produced through crowdsourcing, and especially how and under which conditions. In this paper we develop a typology of worker relations in crowdsourcing by using Marx theory of alienation. The theory serves as a lens to compare and contrast tools for crowdengagement in public policymaking. We show how different types of crowdsourcing can be described as levels of alienation where the worker, the consumer, their relations, and...

puntOorg International Journal, 2021

Knowledge sharing is particularly important for co-creating, discussing, or acquiring innovative ideas. Crowdsourcing, as an enabler of open innovation, has raised the question about the kind of organising forms and/or managerial interventions it may require or underpin. However, there is little consensus in management studies on how to best design a crowdsourcing initiative (contest) with regard to the mechanisms to engage an online community. In this paper, starting from an exploratory case study on the project “Stati Generali della Formazione e del Lavoro” (General Assembly on Training and Work)—a crowdsourcing experience designed for a large community of professional trainers, planned and managed by University of Milano-Bicocca and AIF Academy (Associazione Italiana Formatori), a broad representative association of Italian trainers—we study the factors influencing the decision of the participants (a.k.a., solvers) to become involved (and to what extent) in a contest. The study c...

Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2016

Drawing from literatures in business, the burgeoning field of human computation, and media studies together with economic geography and social theory, this paper contextualizes corporate crowdsourcing in regimes of work and specifies and examines the rationalities governing this early 21st century round of exploitation. I refer to “rationalities” in the Foucauldian sense as the calculated ways by which mentalities become inscribed in a regime of practices, in this case, new practices of work. I present crowdsourcing as the means by which the regime of labor is governed in novel systems of production regarding open innovation as well as non-innovative yet skilled microtasks. I engage firm rationalities of decentralization, which have developed differently for innovative and non-innovative activity; wageless work; JIT labor (distinct from JIT production); precarization; informalization; fungibility; and invisibility. In the penultimate section, I draw from Foucault’s conceptualization...

In this paper, we first provide a practical yet rigorous definition of crowdsourcing that incorporates “crowds,” outsourcing, and social web technologies. We then analyze 103 well-known crowdsourcing websites using content analysis methods and the hermeneutic reading principle. Based on our analysis, we develop a “taxonomic theory” of crowdsourcing by organizing the empirical variants in nine distinct forms of crowdsourcing models. We also discuss key issues and directions, concentrating on the notion of managerial control systems.

2018

The recent shift towards a polycentric perception of business making requires the involvement of stakeholders in an organization’s management. This is a starting point for looking at the idea of crowdsourcing as an innovative business model. The inclusion of stakeholders in the process of developing new products or services forms a general foundation of this notion. Entrepreneurs take advantage of crowdsourcing ventures due to the delegation of tasks to stakeholders in the form of an open call. Crowdsourcing interacts dynamically with interconnected society of today. This trend is symbolized by the turn from a consumer to prosumer and from a content consumer to content creator. The chapter exemplifies the types of crowdsourcing with reference to recent research outcomes. Additionally, it presents crowdsourcing incentives and tackles the problem of ethical and legal risks that face crowdsourcing.

Strategic Direction, 2019

Purpose The paper presents the pros and cons of crowdsourcing competitions and highlights the importance of strategy and collaborative efforts. The study identifies the key stakeholders of crowdsourcing and its critical elements (7Ps) that need to be mapped and managed efficiently for obtaining innovative solutions. Design/methodology/approach The paper draws its insights from the explorative research conducted over a two-year period (2016-18). Qualitative interviews held with competition organizers, participants and innovation intermediaries (Innocentive, Nine Sigma, Skild) provided the primary data. Secondary data came from literature survey and the study of archival documents and competition websites. The study was conducted as a part of doctoral research. Findings Crowdsourcing competitions can help organizations to discover innovative solutions by tapping the power of collective intelligence. However, they need to envision and execute these collaborative initiatives strategical...

2017

With the advances in internet technologies and the emergence of crowdsourcing, organizations are now increasingly looking outside their boundaries for solving problems. Yet, the success of crowdsourcing processes depends on the sustained participation of crowdsourcing individuals. Previous studies have mainly focused on understanding individuals’ initial motivation for participation with few focusing on the factors that affect individuals’ sustained participation in crowdsourcing contests. None of these studies examined how collaboration affects individuals’ participation behavior in crowdsourcing contests. This study attempts to understand how individuals’ collaboration (in the form of comments and votes) affects their sustained participation in online problem solving contests. This study uses data from the Kaggle website that holds online data science competitions in which individuals submit their proposed solutions with the best solutions being rewarded. Our results show that ind...

MIS Quarterly, 2019

We would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments that helped to improve the paper significantly.