When to ask for help: Evaluating Projects for Crowdsourcing Peter Organisciak University 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 sites top 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,

Transcribe Bentham,

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 Given Geoffrey Rockwell Stan Ruecker Acknowledgements