What Drives the Drivers? A Qualitative Perspective on what Motivates the Crowd Delivery Workforce

Crowd delivery is an emerging concept that adds flexibility to the last mile toward the customer. One factor that can hinder the success of such platforms is the availability of drivers. Against this background, this work conducted 27 interviews with current DoorDash, Postmates, and Amazon Flex drivers to gain deep insights into the motivations of these workers. Based on the observations, a self-determination theory (SDT)-based research model is derived. Despite some similarities, we find that the motivations of crowd delivery drivers differ from other crowds. For practitioners, it is important to consider these particularities to reach the critical mass of drivers and attract to most effective workforce. Scholars can use the provided qualitative perspective as a basis for future deductive-confirmatory studies

The open monuments project as an example of social crowdsourcing in culture : factors motivating crowds to share knowledge

This paper describes crowdsourcing as a concept of using the knowledge and skills of virtual communities. The analysis focuses on the case study of the polish, cultural Open Monuments Project. The Open Monuments project was initiated in 2012 by Centrum Cyfrowe Projekt: Polska. Its main goal was to encourage Poles to verify and add information on the monuments featured in the Polish national monument register, which often lacks current addresses, exact dates when particular monuments were constructed, or data which was not required in previous years (e.g. GPS coordinates). The effect of the community work became a springboard for the development of a nationwide website. Today, each monument featured on the website has its own separate page, and Internet users can add information, upload photos and documents, and submit "non-encyclopedia" content, i.e. trivia, legends, or anecdotes. The overriding goal of the paper is to shed some light on the factors that motivate Internet users to engage in social crowdsourcing

The Use of Online Panel Data in Management Research: A Review and Recommendations

Management scholars have long depended on convenience samples to conduct research involving human participants. However, the past decade has seen an emergence of a new convenience sample: online panels and online panel participants. The data these participants provide—online panel data (OPD)—has been embraced by many management scholars owing to the numerous benefits it provides over “traditional” convenience samples. Despite those advantages, OPD has not been warmly received by all. Currently, there is a divide in the field over the appropriateness of OPD in management scholarship. Our review takes aim at the divide with the goal of providing a common understanding of OPD and its utility and providing recommendations regarding when and how to use OPD and how and where to publish it. To accomplish these goals, we inventoried and reviewed OPD use across 13 management journals spanning 2006 to 2017. Our search resulted in 804 OPD-based studies across 439 articles. Notably, our search also identified 26 online panel platforms (“brokers”) used to connect researchers with online panel participants. Importantly, we offer specific guidance to authors, reviewers, and editors, having implications for both micro and macro management scholars

Motivation drivers of millenniums for engaging in crowdsourcing ventures

Double DegreeCrowdsourcing, as the name implies, runs and succeeds on the crowd – the individuals who voluntarily dedicate their time towards this problem solving approach. Therefore, understanding the participation’s underlined motivations is a crucial requirement towards an effective crowdsourcing venture. Current research struggles with assessing these motivations while taking into consideration the variety of crowdsourcing scenarios. Simultaneously, there is a lack of a common motivational variable framework, on which literature can develop upon. To contribute towards these gaps, this research deploys a factorial survey to 174 respondents of the Millennium generation, through which it assesses this particular crowd’s perception of four commonly analyzed motivational dimensions in current crowdsourcing motivation literature: Sense of Cooperation & Community; Monetary Compensation; Sense of Efficacy; and Signaling & Human Capital Advancement. Results found Monetary Compensation and Sense of Efficacy to be motivations supporting the millennial generation participation in crowdsourcing ventures. Research and managerial contributions are discussed, as well the limitations of this study

Characterizing Novelty as a Motivator in Online Citizen Science

Citizen science projects rely on the voluntary contribution of nonscientists to take part in scientific research projects. Projects taking place exclusively over the Internet face significant challenges, chief among them is the attracting and keeping the critical mass of volunteers needed to conduct the work outlined by the science team. The extent to which platforms can design experiences that positively influence volunteers’ motivation can help address the contribution challenges. Consequently, project organizers need to develop strategies to attract new participants and keep existing ones. One strategy to encourage participation is implementing features, which re-enforce motives known to change people’s attitudes towards contributing positively. The literature in psychology noted that novelty is an attribute of objects and environments that occasion curiosity in humans leading to exploratory behaviors, e.g., prolonged engagement with the object or environment. This dissertation described the design, implementation, and evaluation of an experiment conducted in three online citizen science projects. Volunteers received novelty cues when they classified data objects that no other volunteer had previously seen. The hypothesis was that exposure to novelty cues while classifying data positively influences motivational attitudes leading to increased engagement in the classification task and increased retention. The experiments resulted in mixed results. In some projects, novelty cues were universally salient, and in other projects, novelty cues had no significant impact on volunteers’ contribution behaviors. The results, while mixed, are promising since differences in the observed behaviors arise because of individual personality differences and the unique attributes found in each project setting. This research contributes to empirically grounded studies on motivation in citizen science with analyses that produce new insights and questions into the functioning of novelty and its impact on volunteers’ behaviors

Virtual knowledge sharing in crowdsourcing : measurement dilemmas

Jednym z stosunkowo nowych obszarów badań współczesnej nauki o zarządzaniu jest crowdsourcing oraz zachodzące w nim wirtualnym dzieleniu się wiedzą. Jest ono definiowane jako rozpowszechnienie wiedzy przez społeczność wirtualną, informowanie innych, podawanie jej do wiadomości publicznej, oczekiwanie, że inni tę wiedzę skomentują, rozszerzą i uzupełnią. Takie dzielenie się wiedzą jest szczególnie istotne dla współtworzenia, partycypacji czy uzyskiwania innowacyjnych pomysłów przez organizację. Jednak, pomimo jego pozytywnego wpływu na organizację, dotychczas nie było ono przedmiotem kompleksowych badań. Artykuł przedstawia istniejący dorobek w zakresie sposobów pomiaru społecznościowego dzielenia się wiedzą w ramach crowdsourcingu. W opracowaniu można też znaleźć wyjaśnienia, dlaczego warto badać wirtualne dzielenie się wiedzą.One relatively new area of contemporary science research on management is crowdsourcing and virtual knowledge sharing occurring within it. It is defined as the dissemination of knowledge by a virtual community, informing others, making it public, expecting that others will comment on this knowledge, expand and complete it. Such a sharing of knowledge is particularly important for co-creating, participating, or acquiring innovative ideas by an organization. However, despite its positive impact on the organization, it has not been the subject of comprehensive research so far. This article presents the existing output in the scope of the ways of measuring community knowledge sharing within crowdsourcing. In this elaboration, explanations as to why it is worth studying virtual knowledge sharing may be found

Bring them aboard: rewarding participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects

Citizen science involves the general public in research activities that are conducted in collaboration with professional scientists. In these projects, citizens voluntarily contribute to the research aims set forward by the scientists through the collection and analysis of large datasets, without a preliminary technical background required. While advancements in information technology have facilitated the involvement of the general public in citizen science through online platforms, several projects still fail due to limited participation. This paper investigates the feasibility of using selected reward mechanisms to positively influence participation and motivations to contribute in a technology-mediated citizen science project. More specifically, we report the results of an empirical study on the effects of monetary and public online acknowledgement rewards. Survey indices and electroencephalographic measurements are synergistically integrated to offer a comprehensive basis for the analysis of citizens' motivations. Our results suggest that both reward mechanisms could crowd-in participants in technology-mediated citizen science projects. With this study, we seek to lay the foundations for a private-collective research model, where the focus is the intensification of participation in technology-mediated citizen science projects

Theoretical Underpinnings and Practical Challenges of Crowdsourcing as a Mechanism for Academic Study

Researchers in a variety of fields are increasingly adopting crowdsourcing as a reliable instrument for performing tasks that are either complex for humans and computer algorithms. As a result, new forms of collective intelligence have emerged from the study of massive crowd-machine interactions in scientific work settings as a field for which there is no known theory or model able to explain how it really works. Such type of crowd work uses an open participation model that keeps the scientific activity (including datasets, methods, guidelines, and analysis results) widely available and mostly independent from institutions, which distinguishes crowd science from other crowd-assisted types of participation. In this paper, we build on the practical challenges of crowd-AI supported research and propose a conceptual framework for addressing the socio-technical aspects of crowd science from a CSCW viewpoint. Our study reinforces a manifested lack of systematic and empirical research of the symbiotic relation of AI with human computation and crowd computing in scientific endeavors

Frenzy: Collaborative data organization for creating conference sessions

Organizing conference sessions around themes improves the experience for attendees. However, the session creation process can be difficult and time-consuming due to the amount of expertise and effort required to consider alternative paper groupings. We present a collaborative web application called Frenzy to draw on the efforts and knowledge of an entire program committee. Frenzy comprises (a) interfaces to support large numbers of experts working collectively to create sessions, and (b) a two-stage process that decomposes the session-creation problem into meta-data elicitation and global constraint satisfaction. Meta-data elicitation involves a large group of experts working simultaneously, while global constraint satisfaction involves a smaller group that uses the meta-data to form sessions. We evaluated Frenzy with 48 people during a deployment at the CSCW 2014 program committee meeting. The session making process was much faster than the traditional process, taking 88 minutes instead of a full day. We found that meta-data elicitation was useful for session creation. Moreover, the sessions created by Frenzy were the basis of the CSCW 2014 schedule.Ford-MIT AllianceNational Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award SOCS-1111124)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Award SOCS-1208382)United States. Office of Naval Research (Grant N00014-12-1-0211)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS 1016713)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant IIS-1110965

Crowdsourcing Cognitive Presence: A Quantitative Content Analysis of a K12 Educator MOOC Discussion Forum

Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) offer participants opportunities to engage with content and discussion forums similar to other online courses. Pedagogical components of MOOCs and the nature of learning are worth of examining due to issues involving scale, interaction and the role of the instructor (Ross, Sinclair, Know, Bayne & McLeod, 2014). The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework provides a basis for measuring cognitive presence in online discussion forums. As voluntary point of entry to a community of learners, it is important to consider the nature of participant contributions in terms of cognitive presence. This study focused on an educator MOOC because MOOCs have been proposed as an efficient vehicle for providing professional development due to the significant self-identification of participants as educators (Ho et al. 2014). Participant attributes have been categorized, however the discussion forum is difficult to study on a massive scale (Kizilcec, Piech, & Schulz, 2013). Automated measures of cognitive presence may not provide the full view of learning behaviors implicit in messages posted to the forums (Wong, Pursel, Divinsky & Jansen, 2015). To address this gap, the forum messages were hand-coded and analyzed using quantitative content analysis (Neuendorf, 2002). The study found that the measure of exploration increased over the duration of the course. Viewing cognitive presence over time provided a new metaphor for explaining the proportions of cognitive presence in the discussion forum of an educator MOOC. This finding suggests that increased instructor presence during the later stages of the course may increase cognitive presence over time (Akyol & Garrison, 2007; Garrison & Cleveland-Innes, 2005)