Organic crowdsourcing systems

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has the potential to enable distributed teamwork at scale. While some existing crowdsourcing systems have attracted voluntary crowds to achieve shared goals, little research has investigated underlying design principles and mechanisms that make these systems successful. I explore organic crowdsourcing, a form of crowdsourcing in which people collectively contribute work while engaging in a meaningful experience themselves. Two major properties of organic crowdsourcing are: (1) people individually benefit by participating in the crowdsourcing workflow, and (2) the collectively produced outcome is of value to the crowd. I present organic crowdsourcing applications from three domains: learning from an instructional video, planning an academic conference, and understanding a government budget. In these domains, the crowd is intrinsically motivated to participate in the crowd work, while the system prompts, collects, processes, and presents the crowd's collective contributions to produce a valuable outcome for the users of the same system.