Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition

Crowdsourcing is a relatively recent concept that encompasses many practices. This diversity leads to the blurring of the limits of crowdsourcing that may be identified virtually with any type of internet-based collaborative activity, such as co-creation or user innovation. Varying definitions of crowdsourcing exist, and therefore some authors present certain specific examples of crowdsourcing as paradigmatic, while others present the same examples as the opposite. In this article, existing definitions of crowdsourcing are analysed to extract common elements and to establish the basic characteristics of any crowdsourcing initiative. Based on these existing definitions, an exhaustive and consistent definition for crowdsourcing is presented and contrasted in 11 cases.Estelles Arolas, E.; González-Ladrón-De-Guevara, F. (2012). Towards an integrated crowdsourcing definition. Journal of Information Science. 32(2):189-200. doi:10.1177/0165551512437638S189200322Vukovic, M., & Bartolini, C. 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An Abstract Formal Basis for Digital Crowds

Crowdsourcing, together with its related approaches, has become very popular in recent years. All crowdsourcing processes involve the participation of a digital crowd, a large number of people that access a single Internet platform or shared service. In this paper we explore the possibility of applying formal methods, typically used for the verification of software and hardware systems, in analysing the behaviour of a digital crowd. More precisely, we provide a formal description language for specifying digital crowds. We represent digital crowds in which the agents do not directly communicate with each other. We further show how this specification can provide the basis for sophisticated formal methods, in particular formal verification.Comment: 32 pages, 4 figure