On the Configuration of Crowdsourcing Projects

Abstract

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm, facilitated by the ease and scale of online connectivity, which harnesses the power of the crowds to solve problems and contribute knowledge. Crowdsourcing has been tried in practice and there are several commercial general-purpose crowdsourcing platforms on the web. Although the paradigm feasibility and impact have become evident, we still lack engineering methods and principles which aid the construction of quality crowdsourcing-based solutions. One of these aspects is the compatibility between the various configuration choices of the elements of a crowdsourcing project. In a previous work, the authors surveyed the literature and extracted a taxonomy of the various features which describes each of the four pillars of crowdsourcing: the crowd, the crowdsourcer, the crowdsourced task and the crowdsourcing platform. In this paper, the authors study the inter-relations between these features when configuring a crowdsourcing project. They start with an initial template and then confirm and enhance it by an expert study which involves 37 experts who applied crowdsourcing in practice and published research results. Their study helps crowdsourcers and crowdsourcing platform developers to better understand the several peculiarities that may arise by combining these features and thus assist them in the configuration of crowdsourcing projects with more awareness.