Location-based crowdsourcing: extending crowdsourcing to the real world

  • Authors:

  • Florian Alt;Alireza Sahami Shirazi;Albrecht Schmidt;Urs Kramer;Zahid Nawaz

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Duisburg-Essen, Schützenbahn, Essen, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Schützenbahn, Essen, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Schützenbahn, Essen, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Schützenbahn, Essen, Germany;University of Duisburg-Essen, Schützenbahn, Essen, Germany

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 6th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction: Extending Boundaries
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

The WWW and the mobile phone have become an essential means for sharing implicitly and explicitly generated information and a communication platform for many people. With the increasing ubiquity of location sensing included in mobile devices we investigate the arising opportunities for mobile crowdsourcing making use of the real world context. In this paper we assess how the idea of user-generated content, web-based crowdsourcing, and mobile electronic coordination can be combined to extend crowdsourcing beyond the digital domain and link it to tasks in the real world. To explore our concept we implemented a crowd-sourcing platform that integrates location as a parameter for distributing tasks to workers. In the paper we describe the concept and design of the platform and discuss the results of two user studies. Overall the findings show that integrating tasks in the physical world is useful and feasible. We observed that (1) mobile workers prefer to pull tasks rather than getting them pushed, (2) requests for pictures were the most favored tasks, and (3) users tended to solve tasks mainly in close proximity to their homes. Based on this, we discuss issues that should be considered during designing mobile crowdsourcing applications.