Crowdsourcing Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

The aim of the research is to analyse how digitalization and the opportunities of new media effect film industry and audience by analysing some specific examples of films which are supported financially by crowds. As Mc Luhan and Harold Innis clearly state; the culture is shaped according to the way we communicate. It has been widely accepted that the developments and convergence in new media also have some effects on the methods, the content and the disturbution of movies. In the same vein, Chuck Tryon also argues that film culture is being redefined by digital media. In other words, it can be claimed that audiences and social practises of watching and making films have also changed in recent years. The new audience named as 'prosumers' demands to be eligible to have an influence on the films that are going to be released. Crowdfunding which is a type of crowdsourcing, first described by Jeff Howe as a social revolution, is believed to be a remarkable way to analyse this new audience who wants to have an influence on both the content and the production of films. Some people believe that, using crowdfunding to produce films, is not only a way of getting financial support but also a way of creating communities who support the film during the production and distribution processes. The main question is that; can crowdfunding create an alternative and more independent way of doing films or is it just a new marketing tool for producers? This research attempts to find out the advantages, disadvantages and possible differences of the films that are made by crowdfunding and the ones that are made using the traditional ways of film making. The data will be collected through direct interviews with the producers of the selected films and quantitative analysis will be used to analyse the collected data. While doing the research; Alvin Toffler's definition of prosumer and Pierre Levy's collective intelligence are going to be taken into consideration and also the relation between democracy and new media is going to be discussed according to two different approaches; liberal and critical theory.

- by
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- New Media, Collective Intelligence, Participation, Crowdsourcing

The main aim of this study is to gain a better understanding of the role of verbal concepts in the architectural design processes of the students in a studio context. To serve this purpose, we carried out a 15-week studio in an urban architectural masters design studio at KU Leuven Faculty of Architecture. We observed the use of verbal concepts in time during this studio and analyzed the design processes of the students based on their self-report logs on the studio web platform. Based on these, we conducted a statistic analysis and a network mapping study. We found that early concepts provide a starting point for developing fully-fledged specialized design ideas. Furthermore, a higher number of links between concepts indicated their importance during the process. In addition, the data collection and research methods proved to be reliable for mapping the design process of the students as well as revealing the evolution of the ideas in the studio.

- by Burak Pak
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- Engineering, Design Research, Concepts, Crowdsourcing

Musicians' drive to be productive on the Internet led to the development of practices that can inform popular music education. Expanding the concept of popular music education to include online participatory culture practices provides inspiration for musicking online relevant not only in times of uncertainty (like during mandated quarantines experienced during the COVID outbreak in 2020), but also during times of prosperity when practices can be explored in classrooms and during leisure time. In this article, the author discusses three dispositions towards online musicking: DIY-disposition (do-it-yourself), DIWO-disposition (do-it-with-others) and DIFO-disposition (do-it-for-others). The development of these dispositions leads to online and musical literacies that help develop the skills needed for online musicking and performance. This text offers a creation theory about approaching online musicking that can be applied to new technologies and media as online platforms appear and fade on the Internet.

- by Christopher Cayari
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- Music, Music Education, Music Technology, Popular Music Studies
- by Irwan Subastian
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- Algorithms, Spatial Analysis, Visualization, Interpolation (Geostatistics)

We describe the development of web-based software that facilitates large-scale, crowdsourced image extraction and annotation within image-heavy corpora that are of interest to the digital humanities. An application of this software is then detailed and evaluated through a case study where it was deployed within Amazon Mechanical Turk to extract and annotate faces from the archives of Time magazine. Annotation labels included categories such as age, gender, and race that were subsequently used to train machine learning models. The systemization of our crowdsourced data collection and worker quality verification procedures are detailed within this case study. We outline a data verification methodology that used validation images and required only two annotations per image to produce high-fidelity data that has comparable results to methods using five annotations per image. Finally, we provide instructions for customizing our software to meet the needs for other studies, with the goal ...

- by Ana Jofre
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- Computer Science, Software Engineering, Digital Humanities, Crowdsourcing
- by Constantinos Costa
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- Crowdsourcing, Trajectory, NIST, Upper Bound

Organizations have been experimenting with intraorganizational crowdsourcing (IOC), yet the mechanisms of IOC production remain an underresearched topic. Drawing on a 2-mode ERGM, we examine structural mechanisms and individual-level factors that shape the network structure of idea generation and selection yielded by an IOC idea challenge in a global IT corporation. Results show a Matthew effect leading to 1) highly centralized employee participation around a few " superactive " employees who engage with many ideas and 2) highly centralized idea popularity with a few ideas attracting most employee attention. We find support for shared affiliations among employee-idea clusters in the first half of the participation, which is, however, less likely in the second half. We also find support for geographic homophily. The rise of crowdsourcing platforms for idea generation and selection has attracted research on their implications for organizational problem solving and innovation (Brabham, 2013). However, most studies have focused on open crowdsourcing platforms, which allow the influx of ideas beyond a clearly defined, formal organizational boundary. By contrast, relatively few studies have examined how intraor-ganizational crowdsourcing (IOC) platforms allow organizations to tap the collective wisdom within a closed system of employees for new ideas and innovation. More importantly, little attention has been

Harnessing human computation through crowdsourcing offers a new approach to solving complex problems, especially those that are relatively easy for humans but difficult for computers. Micro-tasking platforms such as Amazon Mechanical Turk have attracted large, on-demand workforces of millions of workers as well as hundreds of thousands of job requesters. Achieving high quality results and minimizing the total task execution times are the two of the main goals of these crowdsourcing systems. Drawing on cognitive load theory and usability design principles, we study the effects of different user interface designs on performance and the latency of crowdsourcing systems. Our results indicate that complex and poorly designed user interfaces contributed to lower worker performance and increased task latency.

- by Joseph Davis
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- Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction, User Interface, Crowdsourcing

Geocoding process of unstructured or poor quality location addresses requires human supervision in order to obtain valuable data. Current availability of geocoding web-service technologies, enabling the deployment of collaborative applications and the existence of volunteering communities, has motivated the proposal of a platform to generate geocoding collaborative tasks relying on the available solutions in order to get accurate results in short-term. In this work we present the design and development of a tool that facilitates to volunteers the geocoding process. We implement some strategies to give the volunteers elaborated information about web-service geocoding results and the capacity to propose other positions different than those suggested. All the information is registered in a database model to enable later analysis or accuracy studies.

- by José Pablo Gómez-Barrón and +1
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- Crowdsourcing, VGI, Geocoding
- by Matthew Marge
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- Crowdsourcing
- by Andreas Symeonidis
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- Computer Science, Data Mining, Crowdsourcing, Data Collection

Concerning political and social reform of Korean society after the ‘Candle revolution’ and impeachment of a president, the civil society and the political sphere show different approaches to the problem. The people (or citizens) assembled and marched with candles in their hands on the square longing for constitutional government and better society, and consequently, the head of government who lost the people’s trust was removed from the office. This brought our society an opportunity to discuss the new constitutional order – in other words, we encountered a ‘Constitutional momentum’. The Special Committee on the Constitution, which was constituted in the Parliament at the end of last year, tried to proceed a quick process of constitutional amendment whereas most citizens are not in agreement. So the history of ‘revolution by the people’ and ‘constitution-making without the people’ is about to repeat itself. Constitutions in democratic countries are people’s documents and therefore gain legitimacy by people’s participation in the constitution-making process. Moreover, constitution-making in accord with the constitutional momentum driven by the people should be accomplished by the people and for the people.
This paper introduces the Iceland’s constitution-making case after an economic crisis in 2008. Confronting unprecedented financial crisis and inefficient action by government, Icelandic people were deeply disappointed with political elites and looked back on the ground of the society, and then they decided to make a new constitution for re-establishment of social values. Many people participated in the process of constitution-making, from the very first step to decide what were the most important values in the country and should be included in a new constitution and then they participated also in the next step to produce a draft. The most innovative and revolutionary point in democratic perspective in the process was that the draft for a new constitution was written with direct participation of its people for the first time in history. The internet and social media made it possible to make a crowdsourced constitution. The Iceland’s constitutional experiment, which combines the trust of collective wisdom with internet communication technology for constitution-making, is full of suggestion concerning current discussion of constitutional amendment – without citizens – in Korea.

- by Jeong-In Yun
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- Constitutional Law, Collective Intelligence, Democracy, Crowdsourcing

Danske virksomheder står i disse år overfor at tilpasse sig til den fjerde industrielle revolution, som bygger på den teknologiske udvikling og ikke mindst digitalisering (Erhvervs & Vækstministeriet, 2016). Kollektiv intelligens er i høj grad et begreb, der er ved at udbredes i en digitaliseret samtid. Nyere forskningslitteratur påviser, at ”crowds” har kollektiv intelligens, der kan bidrage med nye kreative og innovative løsninger, og endda forudsige fremtiden for virksomheder ganske præcist (Cowgill & Zitzewitz, 2015; Dahan, Soukhoroukova, & Spann, 2010; Hong & Page, 2001; 2004; Surowiecki, 2004).
Formålet med denne forskningsrapport er at skabe et overblik vedrørende viden om og anvendelsen af kollektiv intelligens og relaterede crowdsourcing-metoder blandt beslutningstagere i Danmarks ledende virksomheder på tværs af sektorer.
Empirien er indsamlet ved semi-strukturerede spørgeskemaundersøgelser i form af telefoninterviews med CEOs, direktører, afdelingsledere og mellemledere i 50 af de største virksomheder i Danmark på tværs af sektorer og inkluderer i alt 69 besvarelser.
Som det første større kvantitative og kvalitative studie i Danmark af kollektiv intelligens adfærd blandt danske virksomheder, undersøger vi virksomhedernes brug af crowdsourcing-metoder, herunder crowdsourcing af kreative og innovative løsninger samt anvendelsen af prediction markets og brugen af crowd forudsigelser uden markeder.
Hovedkonklusionerne af forskningsrapporten er, at de største danske virksomheder står overfor et anseligt potentiale med hensyn til at implementere kollektiv intelligens adfærd og crowdsourcing teknikker for at skabe øget konkurrencefordele i fremtiden. Virksomheder, der har brugt crowdsourcing tidligere har i højere grad forventning om at bruge crowdsourcing end virksomheder, der ikke har brugt crowdsourcing. Virksomheder, der scorer højt på industri-ekspertise har større forventning om at bruge crowdsourcing i fremtiden. Eksternt pres på virksomheder giver samtidig en større sandsynlighed for crowdsourcing i fremtiden. Det er særligt i sektorer, der har en stigende mangfoldighed i kunders ønsker, at man forventer at anvende crowdsourcing.
Til sammenligning med anerkendte globale virksomheder, kan det konkluderes at danske erhvervsledere, som er repræsenteret i udvalget har viden om kollektiv intelligens og crowdsourcing, mens anvendelsen af disse områder er mindre udbredt. Det betyder at virksomhederne har et stort uudnyttet potentiale med henblik på at tilpasse sig den globale udvikling indenfor anvendelsen af kollektiv intelligens og crowdsourcing-metoder.

- by Murat Ali Bayir
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- Ubiquitous Computing, Meteorology, Wireless Sensor Networks, Twitter

The paper describes the work undertaken by a team of researchers for designing a platform that aims to connect digital content in the form of oral history recordings to the city locations they refer to. The content will be made available in a variety of ways, including a web interface, a mobile application and possibly audio guides.
The study aims to contribute to the body of studies dedicated to urban informatics and community informatics, looking at how a city’s digital and physical layers can be interweaved and re-appropriated through community involvement and participation.

- by Gabriela Avram and +1
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- Oral history, Crowdsourcing, Urban Informatics, Mobile and Location-Based Media

The era of journalism and the participation of the readers on online media websites have changed online journalism. The research interest is now focused on removing the distinction between the publisher/entrepreneur and the journalist/user, with the ultimate goal of actively involving citizens in the journalistic process but also in the web presence of media websites. The evolution of technology, the deep media crisis and the growing dissatisfaction of the citizens, create the conditions for journalism to work with citizens, and in particular through citizen journalism and journalism crowdsourcing. This concept is a form of collective online activity in which a person or a group of people volunteer to engage in work that always involves mutual benefit to both sides. The main research question of this research concerns the analysis of the current situation regarding crowdsourcing, co-creation and UGC and the adoption of best practices such as crowdcreation, comments from the users, c...

- by Agisilaos Konidaris
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- Marketing, Communication, Journalism, Online Communities

Social media and crowdsourcing (SMCS) are increasingly proving useful for addressing the effects of natural and human-made hazards. SMCS allow different stakeholders to share crucial information during disaster management processes and to strengthen community resilience through engagement and collaboration. To harvest these opportunities there is a need for better knowledge on SMCS for diverse disaster scenarios. These challenges are being addressed within the LINKS Horizon 2020 project. The project aims at strengthening societal resilience by producing advanced learning on the use of SMCS in disasters. This is done through an in-depth study across three knowledge domains (disaster risk perception and vulnerability, disaster management processes, disaster community technologies), the establishment of an interactive Framework, and an online platform in which a community of relevant stakeholders can learn and share knowledge and experiences. This paper provides an overview of the project objectives and approaches and a summary of the initial results.

- by LINKS Project
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- Social Media, Disaster Management, Crowdsourcing

n this paper, we trace a line through the recent story of agent-based social simulation from the point of view of the LABBS, the laboratory of agent-based so- cial simulation that Cristiano Castelfranchi has contributed to create and helped grow. From this observatory, we deploy a set of arguments defending the need for social simulation as one of the best chances we have to make a much needed step forward in the scientific endeavor of the twenty first century: understanding society. Building on these arguments, we point out several reasons that caused social simulation to fall several measures short of the big challenge, discussing some famous examples from the literature. We then introduce the concept of crowdsourcing, trying to elaborate on how it could reshape this methodology for computational social science.

- by Mario Paolucci
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- Crowdsourcing, Social Simulation

Understanding what motivates participation in online innovation communities is now a high priority given the recent interest in crowdsourcing as an approach to increasing diversity and creativity in innovation. This article reports on the results of a survey of participants in an online innovation community to characterise and find correlations between motivation and participation styles. An analysis of the survey results show: the majority of participants were contributors or collaborators, not readers or leaders; reasons for joining collective innovation communities can be different to the reason for continuing to participate; primary motivations for participation are fun and challenge; intrinsic motivations rated higher than extrinsic; and the participants that are passionate about the online community are either new members, < 1 month, or long standing members, > 6 months.

This article theorizes the functional relationship between the human components (i.e., scholars) and non-human components (i.e., structural configurations) of academic domains. It is organized around the following question: in what ways have scholars formed and been formed by the structural configurations of their academic domain? The article uses as a case study the academic domain of education and technology to examine this question. Its authorship approach is innovative, with a worldwide collection of academics (99 authors) collaborating to address the proposed question based on their reflections on daily social and academic practices. This collaboration followed a three-round process of contributions via email. Analysis of these scholars’ reflective accounts was carried out, and a theoretical proposition was established from this analysis. The proposition is of a mutual (yet not necessarily balanced) power (and therefore political) relationship between the human and non-human co...

- by Elaine Khoo
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- Information Technology, Education, Educational Technology, Higher Education

Estimating health outcomes at a neighborhood scale is important for promoting urban health, yet costly and time-consuming. In this paper, we present a machine-learning-enabled approach to predicting the prevalence of six common non-communicable chronic diseases at the census tract level. We apply our approach to the City of Austin and show that our method can yield fairly accurate predictions. In searching for the best predictive models, we experiment with eight different machine learning algorithms and 60 predictor variables that characterize the social environment, the physical environment, and the aspects and degrees of neighborhood disorder. Our analysis suggests that (a) the sociodemographic and socioeconomic variables are the strongest predictors for tract-level health outcomes and (b) the historical records of 311 service requests can be a useful complementary data source as the information distilled from the 311 data often helps improve the models' performance. The machine learning models yielded from this study can help the public and city officials evaluate future scenarios and understand how changes in the neighborhood conditions can lead to changes in the health outcomes. By analyzing where the most significant discrepancies between the predicted and the actual values are, we will also be ready to identify areas of best practice and areas in need of greater investment or policy intervention.

- by Chen Feng
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- Machine Learning, Crowdsourcing, Urban Health, Open Data

This paper presents a first version of a methodology for risk management of crowdsourcing intermediaries. The methodology comprises three phases. Each phase is interlinked and designed to build support and trust as the collaboration develops. Managing risks is central to the open innovation strategy. Open innovation comprises several models. Crowdsourcing innovation is one of them and the focus of this paper. There aren’t relevant scientific or empirical studies explaining how to manage the risks of intermediairies .. In crowdsourcing innovation strategy, a company posts a problem by an open call and a vast number of individuals offer solutions to the problem. The winning ideas are awarded some form of a bounty and the company mass produces the idea for its own gain. This strategy can be applied in two ways: (1) by internally identifying business problems and needs for innovation, which are identified by individuals, teams and organizational units (seekers). Innovation challenges are then made available to a community of internal and external specialists motivated to provide their knowledge and skills to address them. In this way, employees of the company can improve their internal visibility and be empowered in decision processes across the company; (2) by placing the company’s innovation challenges to an external brokering service that can find the right people to present the solutions (solvers). This work presents a first proposal of a methodology to managing risks associated with crowdsourcing innovation.

- by Lieda Amaral and +1
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- Risk Management, Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing

Crowdsourcing is the process of getting work or funding, usually online, from a crowd of people. The word is a combination of the words 'crowd' and 'outsourcing'. Human resource management crowdsourcing has broken new grounds for its use in functions like recruitment, employee surveys, talent assessment, learning and even performance reviews. Crowdsourcing in HR further helps to gather opinions of employees on understanding the culture needs and to get them more engaged. The future of HR is digitally wired globally and to attract the best talent, HR needs to be constantly in touch with the millennial generation

- by IAEME Publication
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- International HRM, Crowdsourcing, Recruitment, Crowdsourcing Translation
- by Jon Winet
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- Engineering, Cultural Studies, Computer Science, Information Architecture

La crisi economica ha avuto ripercussioni anche su quelle politiche pubbliche e sociali che ricadono maggiormente sulla vita del cittadino. Una panoramica sul modello di business del crowdfunding si declina in quello che viene chiamato civic crowdfunding: un finanziamento che da alcuni anni sta riscuotendo successo e potrebbe essere una soluzione alternativa alla tassazione di comunità molto piccole.

- by laura carrer
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- Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, Pubblica Amministrazione, Civic Crowdfunding
- by Kania Audrint
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- Health Sciences, Crowdsourcing, Medicine

Crowdsourcing can be used to obtain the ground truth that is needed to evaluate information retrieval systems. However, the quality of crowdsourced ground truth may be questionable using workers of unknown quality with possible spammers amongst them. This study presents a new approach to detect close to all spammers by comparing judgments between workers. We compared the consistency of crowdsourced ground truth to the consistency of ground truth obtained from expert annotators, and conclude that crowdsourcing can match the quality obtained from expert annotators.

- by Jeroen Vuurens
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- SPAM, Crowdsourcing

The literature on open innovation portrays open business models as a contemporary and extremely useful tool, which can be used by companies to create and capture value in collaboration with external partners. This paper takes the discussion a step further by examining the effect of opening business models in the newspaper industry. Based on interviews with key informants from the two largest media groups in Denmark, together with archival data from 2002 to 2011, we show how the internet and related technology
developments have disrupted the long-standing successful business model of the industry. Our findings suggest that a more nuanced view and balanced understanding of the term ‘openness’ as regards business models is needed, since open business models may have other manifestations and implications for business model viability than have been reported in the literature so far

- by Anna B. Holm and +1
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- Media Studies, Knowledge Management, Innovation statistics, Media Management

Crowdsourcing has emerged as an exciting new method for data collection yet its eficacy remains
poorly understood. As part of our mission to end the social acceptability of sexual harassment in Egypt,
HarassMap has conducted a study to investigate the strengths and weaknesses of crowdsourcing as a
data collection method comparing it to traditional data collection techniques, such as questionnaires,
focus groups and interviews. This study took place in order to draw a clearer picture of the role
crowdsourced data can play both in our work and the work of others, as well as to provide insights
into how sexual harassment, which has long been an issue in Egypt, is conceptualized and understood.
The research was conducted in six administrative units of Greater Cairo (Helwan, Imbaba, Masr Elgedida, Masr El-qadima, Shubra El-kheima, and Shubra Masr) covering a range of socio-economic
backgrounds.

- by Amel Fahmy
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- Sexual Violence, Crowdsourcing, Civic Engagement, Gender and Technology
- by Jon Winet
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- Cultural Studies, Information Architecture, Crowdsourcing, Programming

Perverse complicity in Christian celebration of pain?
Futility of highlighting denial of Christian complicity in torture
Promotion of enhanced torture on behalf of the American people
Crowdsourcing appropriate punishment for enemies of the American people
WikiJustice, WikiRetribution, WikiPunition, or WikiSalvation -- for Assange?
Types of torture variously used by Christians and applicable to Assange
Hanging, drawing and quartering as symbolic of Christian retribution?
Christian complicity in distortion of the truth symbolized by Cross
Religious enactment of the suffering and torture of Assange
Whistleblowing as a "crime of passion" -- for the truth?

- by Anthony Judge
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- Whistleblowing, Crowdsourcing, State Complicity in Torture, Pain Management

A new era of participation marketing has dawned and co-creativity is at the heart of this highly-collaborative business model. While crowdsourcing may have decentralized some aspects of marketing, creativity and innovation through open calls to the public ... co-creativity has democratized the relationship between brands, employees and customers by building a trusted community of collaborative peers.

- by Sharon M McIntyre
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- Crowdsourcing, Co-creation

The article presents a general model of crowdsourcing maturity (MGMC), focused on measuring the maturity of managerial, behavioral and technological aspects that support the activities of crowdsourcing in organizations. As methodology, it was used a systematic literature review, taking into account the low number of research publications and the low number of literature reviews prescribing practices of Crowd-sourcing Maturity Models. It has been developed an assessment tool that accompanies this model to facilitate practical applications. The results of this study indicate that the maturity model developed can serve as a useful tool to describe and guide the efforts to implement such concept, providing a clear description of the current situation, and guidelines to follow. To assess its validity and improve generalization, future research can apply the Crowdsourcing Maturity Model proposal to different contexts. Resumen El artículo presenta un modelo general de madurez de crowdsourcing (MGMC), enfocado en la medición de la madurez de los aspectos gerenciales, comportamentales y tecnológicos que apoyan las actividades del crowdsourcing en organizaciones. La metodología utilizada fue la revisión sistemática de literatura, teniendo en cuenta la baja cantidad de publicaciones de investigación y el bajo número de revisiones de la literatura que prescriben las prácticas de los Modelos de Madurez Crowdsourcing. Se ha desarrollado una herramienta de evaluación que acompaña este modelo para facilitar la aplicación práctica. Los resultados de este trabajo indican que el modelo de madurez desarrollado puede servir como una herramienta útil que describe y orien-ta los esfuerzos de implementación de dicho concepto, proporcionando una clara descripción de la situación

- by CARLOS MARIO DURANGO YEPES and +1
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- Crowdsourcing
- by Donna Vakharia and +1
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- Information Systems, Information Retrieval, Human Computer Interaction, Crowdsourcing
- by Ognjen Scekic
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- Information Systems, Computer Science, Crowdsourcing, Socio-Technical Systems

In this paper, I explore the concept of multitude according to the writings of Toni Negri, Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno and in opposition to the concept of mass, developed by the French thinker Gustave Le Bon. Multitude appears as a kind... more

- by Edgar Straehle
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- Wikis, Internet Studies, Commons, Facebook

This paper shows how the two virtues of collective intelligence – cognitive diversity and large crowds – turn into perils in crowdsourced policymaking. That is because of a conflict between the logic of the crowds and the logic of policymaking. The crowd’s logic differs from that of traditional policymaking in several aspects. To mention some of those: In traditional
policymaking it is a small group of experts making proposals to the policy, whereas in crowdsourced policymaking, it is a large, anonymous crowd with a
mixed level of expertise. The crowd proposes atomic ideas, whereas traditional policymaking is used to dealing with holistic and synthesized proposals. By drawing on data from a crowdsourced law-making process in Finland, the paper shows how the logics of the crowds and policymaking collide in practice. The conflict prevents policymaking fully benefiting from the crowd’s input, and it also hinders governments from adopting crowdsourcing more widely as a practice for deploying open policymaking practices.

The digital age has changed the way we consume information and left organizations struggling to adapt to new technologies and information exchange mechanisms. Civic crowdfunding is one such new technology that has the potential to redefine what local government means from an individual and administrative perspective, but there remains little knowledge about what it is and where it fits in the public space. This research attempts to unravel these questions by providing an overview of the field of civic crowdfunding and explaining what types of projects are undertaken, what projects are successfully funded, and what factors lead to successful projects.

- by Martin Mayer
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- Public Finance, Crowdsourcing, Crowdfunding, Civic Crowdfunding

- by Laura E Sujo-Montes
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- Information Technology, Education, Educational Technology, Higher Education

This article describes the Seeking Solutions approach a problem solving conference using open innovation. The Seeking Solutions process consists of four steps: a call for problems, problem selection, problem broadcast, and a collaborative event. This approach has been successfully used for several events since 2010 with concrete results and real impacts. By mixing open innovation and collaboration, the Seeking Solutions approach brings a new way to solve complex problems and generate real innovation.

- by Christophe Deutsch
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- Open Innovation, Crowdsourcing, Innovation Management

Wars are often described and discussed from a single point of view. Vietnam War Stories: Stories from All Sides is an interactive digital storytelling platform that incorporated video interviews recorded from over 150 Vietnam War veterans and survivors from all sides, including U.S., North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Europe, and Asia on a historically accurate map. This project utilizes the perspectives of network science to integrate digital historical multimedia artifacts into a coherent network of linked resources that can then be visualized and represented in an interactive prototype. This allows the historians, researchers, and scholars to easily access the previously undocumented and segmented historical content, and easily explore connections between them. It also serves as an educational platform, allowing the public to navigate war stories in a highly personal and engaging fashion. Most importantly, "Vietnam War Stories" enables historical argumentation and interpretations of the individual experiences of Vietnam War by presenting multiple accounts and perspectives from primary sources as previously undocumented evidence of both sides of the Vietnam War. Furthermore, "Vietnam War Stories" will inform the design of future platforms that will offer the veterans a way to connect with other veterans and survivors and empower them with a channel to share their own stories.

- by Patrick C Shih
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- Cultural Heritage, Narrative, War Studies, Digital History
- by Alessandro Bozzon and +1
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- Crowdsourcing

One key role of urban informatics is to understand demands, challenges, and opportunities for major infrastructure projects in a bottom-up format. In this respect, engaging citizens through communication tools available in Social Web, and distilling micro-knowledge distributed among them appear to be reliable and promising streams. Chaotic nature and large size of unstructured big-data gathered in this way, and semantic barriers for understanding and classifying the content are among other difficulties which challenge efficiency and effectiveness of such methods. This paper suggests a specific form of collective intelligence, which can be described as 'collective classification', as a strategy and employs crowdsourcing as a tool to overcome such difficulties. We explain crowdsourcing in form of a Game With A Purpose, designed and run by University of Toronto between June and August of 2013. The game aimed to classify the content of online feeds in the context of sustainability of infrastructure projects, and to form a folksonomy for decoding the future communication. Players of the game were provided with 'sustainability' (at a holistic view covering its three main pillars: economy, environment, and society) as the context, a set of relevant tweets as items to be annotated, and a set of indicators developed in the domain literature as a template to follow. On top of the predefined indicators, the participants were allowed to suggest and create their own classes. Players' inputs were used in scoring other players' performance and this refined the results by drawing on the 'Wisdom of the Crowd'. The core contribution of the research is to use human computation in a bottom-up approach to solve a transdisciplinary problem which traditionally has been tackled via top-down solutions. As an example, taxonomies created by domain professionals are normally biased towards professionals; such traditional solutions normally lack context-sensitivity in nature, constructivism in approach, and pluralism in perspective. The method and the platform presented by this paper can be directly applied in similar studies to benchmark, classify, and fine-tune public perspective/knowledge in urban infrastructure related technical or semi-technical issues.

- by Mazdak Nik Bakht
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- Infrastructure Planning, Folksonomies, Social Media, Crowdsourcing

Big data is a misnomer. While the field is relatively young, much thought has already been churned on critiquing the term, particularly on how we cannot equate the scale of data with diversity. Thereby, in the name of diversity, we should look at big data from the angle of the global south. After all, majority of the world’s population reside outside the West. Yet, when we pay attention to the debates on surveillance, privacy and net neutrality and the demand for alternative models and practices to sustain the digital commons, they are primarily driven by western concerns, contexts, and user behaviors from these privileged domains. This undoubtedly provides a thwarted view of the internet. [click the link for the full article]

- by Payal Arora
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- Digital Divide, New Media, Development Studies, Internet Studies