Facilitating Collocated Crowdsourcing on Situated Displays

Abstract

Online crowdsourcing enables the distribution of work to a global labor force as small and often repetitive tasks. Recently, situated crowdsourcing has emerged as a complementary enabler to elicit labor in specific locations and from specific crowds. Teamwork in online crowdsourcing has been recently shown to increase the quality of output, but teamwork in situated crowdsourcing remains unexplored. We set out to fill this gap. We present a generic crowdsourcing platform that supports situated teamwork and provide experiences from a laboratory study that focused on comparing traditional online crowdsourcing to situated team-based crowdsourcing. We built a crowdsourcing desk that hosts three networked terminal displays. The displays run our custom team-driven crowdsourcing platform that was used to investigate collocated crowdsourcing in small teams. In addition to analyzing quantitative data, we provide findings based on questionnaires, interviews, and observations. We highlight 1) emerging differences between traditional and collocated crowdsourcing, 2) the collaboration strategies that teams exhibited in collocated crowdsourcing, and 3) that a priori team familiarity does not significantly affect collocated interaction in crowdsourcing. The approach we introduce is a novel multi-display crowdsourcing setup that supports collocated labor teams and along with the reported study makes specific contributions to situated crowdsourcing research.

Additional information

Funding

This work is partially funded by the Academy of Finland (Grants 276786-AWARE, 285062-iCYCLE, 286386-CPDSS, 285459-iSCIENCE), and the European Commission (Grants PCIG11-GA-2012-322138 and 645706-GRAGE).

Notes on contributors

Simo Hosio

Simo Hosio ([email protected], http://simohosio.com) is a computer scientist with interests in crowdsourcing, situated technologies and social computing. He is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Ubiquitous Computing in the University of Oulu, Oulu 90014, Finland.

Jorge Goncalves

Jorge Goncalves ([email protected], http://jorgegoncalves.com) is a computer scientist with interests in crowdsourcing, situated technologies, and collaborative and social computing. He is a Lecturer in Human–Computer Interaction at the School of Computing and Information Systems in the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Niels van Berkel

Niels van Berkel ([email protected], http://nielsvanberkel.com) is a computer scientist with interests in human–computer interaction and social computing. He is a PhD student at the School of Computing and Information Systems in the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Simon Klakegg

Simon Klakegg ([email protected]) is a researcher with interests in ubiquitous computing and mobile sensing. He is a PhD student at the Center for Ubiquitous Computing in the University of Oulu, Finland.

Shin’Ichi Konomi

Shin’Ichi Konomi ([email protected]) is a scientist with interests in sensing systems for local communities. He is a professor at the Faculty of Arts and Science in Kyushu University, Japan.

Vassilis Kostakos

Vassilis Kostakos ([email protected], http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/vkostakos) is Professor of Human–Computer Interaction at the University of Melbourne, School of Computing and Information Systems. His research interests include Human–Computer Interaction, Ubiquitous Computing, and Social Media.