Now showing 1 - 10 of 21
  • Publication
    How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively
    (Sciendo, 2020) ;
    Zogaj, Shkodran
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    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    Crowdsourced tasks are very diverse – and so are platform types. They fall into four categories, each demanding different governance mechanisms. The main goal of microtasking crowdsourcing platforms is the scalable and time-efficient batch processing of highly repetitive tasks. Crowdsourcing platforms for information pooling aggregate contributions such as votes, opinions, assessments and forecasts through approaches such as averaging, summation, or visualization. Broadcast search platforms collect contributions to solve tasks in order to gain alternative insights and solutions from people outside the organization, and are particularly suited for solving challenging technical, analytical, scientific, or creative problems. Open collaboration platforms invite contributors to team up to jointly solve complex problems in cases where solutions require the integration of distributed knowledge and the skills of many contributors. Companies establishing crowdsourcing platforms of any type should continuously monitor and adjust their governance mechanisms. Quality and quantity of contributions, project runtime, or the effort for conducting the crowdsourcing project may be good starting points.
  • Publication
    The Nature of Crowd Work and its Effects on Individuals’ Work Perception
    (Taylor & Francis, 2020-03-03)
    Durward, David
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    Crowd work reflects a new form of gainful employment on the Internet. We study how the nature of the tasks being performed and financial compensation jointly shape work perceptions of crowdworkers in order to better understand the changing modes and patterns of digital work. Surveying individuals on 23 German crowd working platforms, this work is the first to add a multi-platform perspective on perceived working conditions in crowd work. We show that crowd workers need rather high levels of financial compensation before task characteristics become relevant for shaping favorable perceptions of working conditions. We explain these results by considering financial compensation as an informational cue indicating the appreciation of working effort that is internalized by well-paid crowd workers. Resulting boundary conditions for task design are discussed. These results help us understand when and under what conditions crowd work can be regarded as a fulfilling type of employment in highly developed countries.
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    Scopus© Citations 47
  • Publication
    Why Incorporating a Platform-Intermediary can Increase Crowdsourcees’ Engagement
    While the crowdsourcer’s job is to encourage valuable contributions and sustained commitment in a cost-effective manner, it seems as if the primary attention of management and research is still centered on the evaluation of contributions rather than the crowd. As many crowdsourcers lack the resources to successfully execute such projects, crowdsourcing intermediaries play an increasingly important role. First studies dealt with internal management challenges of incorporating an intermediary. However, the issue of how intermediaries influence crowdsourcees’ psychological and behavioral responses, further referred to as engagement, has not been addressed yet. Consequently, two leading research questions guide this paper: (1) How can the engagement process of crowdsourcees be conceptualized? (2) How and why do crowdsourcing intermediaries impact crowdsourcees’ engagement? This study extends existing knowledge by offering IS-researchers a process perspective on engagement and exploring the underlying mechanisms and IT-enabled stimuli that foster value-creation in a mediated and non-mediated setting. A theoretical process model is first conceptualized and then explored with insights from two common cases in the growing field of crowd testing. By triangulating platform and interview data, initial propositions concerning the role of specific stimuli and the intermediary within the engagement process are derived. It is proposed that crowdsourcing enterprises, incorporating intermediaries, have the potential to generate a desired engagement state when perceived stimuli under their control belong to the so-called group of “game changers” and “value adders”, while the intermediary controls mainly “risk factors” for absorbing negative experiences. Apart from the theoretical relevance of studying mediated engagement processes and explaining voluntary use and participation in a socio-technical system, findings support decisions on how to effectively incorporate platform intermediaries.
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  • Publication
    How to Manage Crowdsourcing Platforms Effectively?
    (Sage Publishing, 2018-02-01) ;
    Zogaj, Shkodran
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    Bretschneider, Ulrich
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    To profit from crowdsourcing, organizations can engage in four different approaches: microtasking, information pooling, broadcast search, and open collaboration. This article presents 21 governance mechanisms that can help organizations manage their crowdsourcing platforms. It investigates the effectiveness of these governance mechanisms in 19 case studies and recommends specific configurations of these mechanisms for each of the four crowdsourcing approaches. Also, it offers guidance to organizations that host a crowdsourcing platform by providing recommendations for implementing governance mechanisms into their platforms and building up governance capabilities for crowdsourcing.
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    Scopus© Citations 84
  • Publication
    Leveraging the Power of the Crowd for Software Testing
    (IEEE Computer Society, 2017-03-28) ; ;
    The rapid development of new IT-enabled business models, a fast-growing hardware market, and that market's segmentation are making software testing more complex. So, manual testing is becoming less applicable--economically and practicably. One approach to overcome these issues is crowdtesting--using crowdsourcing to perform testing. To profit from crowdtesting, companies can use three approaches: engage an external crowd of Internet users, engage their employees, or engage their customers. Three case studies illustrate these approaches' differences, benefits, and challenges, and the potential solutions to those challenges. Researchers' experiences with these approaches have led to guidelines that can help software development executives establish crowdtesting in their organizations.
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    Scopus© Citations 36
  • Publication
    Crowd Work
    (Springer Gabler, 2016)
    Durward, David
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    Scopus© Citations 72
  • Publication
    Crowdsourcing: How to Benefit from (Too) Many Great Ideas
    (Kelley School of Business, 2013-12) ; ;
    Krcmar, Helmut
    This article focuses on how companies can cope with the enormous volume and variety of data (big data) that is acquired on crowdsourcing platforms from the worldwide community of Internet users. We identify the challenges of implementing crowdsourcing platforms and show how CIOs and other organizational leaders can build the absorptive capacity necessary to extract business value from crowdsourced data.
  • Publication
    How to Empower the Workforce – Analyzing Internal Crowd Work as a Neo-Socio-Technical System
    ( 2019-01-08)
    Durward, David
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    Simmert, Benedikt
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    In this paper, we analyze internal crowd work as Neo-STS from an employee’s perspective. Based on qualitative interviews, we describe in our model how employees perceive empowerment through participation in internal crowd work. As our main contribution, we detail and extend existing research regarding internal crowd work, Neo-STS as well as empowerment by identifying structural antecedents that affect psychological empowerment of internal crowd workers.
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  • Publication
    The Rise of Crowd Aggregators - How Individual Workers Restructure Their Own Crowd
    Crowd work has emerged as a new form of digital gainful employment whose nature is still a black box. In this paper, we focus on the crowd workers – a perspective that has been largely neglected by research. We report results from crowd worker interviews on two different platforms. Our findings illustrate that crowd aggregators as new players restructure the nature of crowd work sustainably with different effects on the behavior as well as the existing relationships of crowd workers. We contribute to prior research by developing a theoretical framework based on value chain and work aggregation theories which are applicable in this new form of digital labor. For practice, our results provide initial insights that need to be taken into account as part of the ongoing discussion on fair and decent conditions in crowd work.
  • Publication
    Is There PAPA in Crowd Work? : A Literature Review on Ethical Dimensions in Crowdsourcing
    (IEEE, 2016-07-18)
    Durward, David
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    The phenomenon of crowdsourcing has emerged as a new pattern of digitally mediated collaboration. This novel socio-technical arrangement changes the organization of work as well as its general nature and takes place in information systems (IS) in which humans face many threats to their dignity. For this reason, the importance of ethical issues within this new form of employment arises. Hence, in this paper we focus on the ethical issues in crowd work – a perspective that has been largely neglected by current crowdsourcing research. We analyze recent crowdsourcing literature and extract ethical issues by following the PAPA (privacy, accuracy, property and accessibility of information) concept, a well-established approach in IS. The review focuses on the individual perspective of crowdworkers, which addresses their working conditions and benefits. Although, the literature review exhibits that there are PAPA dimensions in crowdsourcing, only few focus on the crowdworkers as individuals. Our findings contribute to further research in crowdsourcing by introducing an ethical framework and give practical insight into how to design sustainable and ethical crowd work.
    Scopus© Citations 16