Alimohammad Shahri

Crowdsourcing: A Taxonomy and Systematic Mapping Study

Abstract Context: Crowdsourcing, or tapping into the power of the crowd for problem solving, has gained ever-increasing attraction since it was first introduced. Crowdsourcing has been used in different disciplines, and it is becoming well-accepted in the marketplace as a new business model which utilizes Human Intelligence Tasks (HITs). Objective: While both academia and industry have extensively delved into different aspects of crowdsourcing, there seems to be no common understanding of what crowdsourcing really means and what core and optional features it has. Also, we still lack information on the kinds and disciplines of studies conducted on crowdsourcing and how they defined it in the context of their application area. This paper will clarify this ambiguity by analysing the distribution and demographics of research in crowdsourcing and extracting taxonomy of the variability and commonality in the constructs defining the concept in the literature. Method: We conduct a systematic mapping study and analyse 113 papers, selected via a formal process, and report and discuss the results. The study is combined by a content analysis process to extract a taxonomy of features describing crowdsourcing. Results: We extract and describe the taxonomy of features which characterize crowdsourcing in its four constituents; the crowd, the crowdsourcer, the crowdsourced task and the crowdsourcing platform. In addition, we report on different mappings between these features and the characteristics of the studied papers. We also analyse the distribution of the research using multiple criteria and draw conclusions. For example, our results show a constantly increasing interest in the area, especially in North America and a significant interest from industry. Also, we illustrate that although crowdsourcing is shown to be useful in a variety of disciplines, the research in the field of computer science still seems to be dominant in investigating it. Conclusions: This study allows forming a clear picture of the research in crowdsourcing and understanding the different features of crowdsourcing and their popularity, what type of research was conducted, where and how and by whom. The study enables researchers and practitioners to estimate the current status of the research in this new field. Our taxonomy of extracted features provides a reference model which could be used to configure crowdsourcing and also define it precisely and make design decisions on which of its variation to adopt.

Towards a Code of Ethics for Gamification at Enterprise

Gamification is an emerging technique which utilises the “fun theory” mainly to motivate people to change their perception and attitude towards certain subjects. Within enterprises, gamification is used to motivate employees to do their tasks more efficiently and perhaps more enjoyably and sometimes to increase their feeling of being members of the enterprise as a community. While the literature has often emphasised the positive side of gamification, mainly from economic and business perspectives, little emphasis has been paid to the ethical use of gamification within enterprises. In this paper we report an empirical research to explore the ethical aspects of using gamification. We follow a mixed methods approach involving participants who are gamification experts, employees and managers. Our findings show that, for gamification, there is a fine line between being a positive tool to motivate employees and being a source of tension and pressure which could then affect the social and mental well-being within the workplace. This paper will evaluate that dual effect and clarify that fine line.

Crowd-centric Requirements Engineering

Requirements engineering is a preliminary and crucial phase for the correctness and quality of software systems. Despite the agreement on the positive correlation between user involvement in requirements engineering and software success, current development methods employ a too narrow concept of that user and rely on a recruited set of users considered to be representative. Such approaches might not cater for the diversity and dynamism of the actual users and the context of software usage. This is especially true in new paradigms such as cloud and mobile computing. To overcome these limitations, we propose crowd-centric requirements engineering (CCRE) as a revised method for requirements engineering where users become primary contributors, resulting in higher-quality requirements and increased user satisfaction. CCRE relies on crowd sourcing to support a broader user involvement, and on gamification to motivate that voluntary involvement.

Configuring crowdsourcing for requirements elicitation

Crowdsourcing is an emerging paradigm which utilises the power of the crowd in contributing information and solving problems. Crowdsourcing can support requirements elicitation, especially for systems used by a wide range of users and working in a dynamic context where requirements evolve regularly. For such systems, traditional elicitation methods are typically costly and limited in catering for the high diversity, scale and volatility of requirements. In this paper, we advocate the use of crowdsourcing for requirements elicitation and investigate ways to configure crowdsourcing to improve the quality of elicited requirements. To confirm and enhance our argument, we follow an empirical approach starting with two focus groups involving 14 participants, users and developers, followed by an online expert survey involving 34 participants from the Requirements Engineering community. We discuss our findings and present a set of challenges of applying crowdsourcing to aid requirements engineering with a focus on the elicitation stage.

A Modelling Language for Transparency Requirements in Business Information Systems

Transparency is a requirement of businesses and their information systems. It is typically linked to positive ethical and economic attributes, such as trust and accountability. Despite its importance, transparency is often studied as a secondary concept and viewed through the lenses of adjacent concepts such as security, privacy and regulatory requirements. This has led to a reduced ability to manage transparency and deal with its peculiarities as a first-class requirement. Ad-hoc introduction of transparency may have adverse effects, such as information overload and reduced collaboration. We propose a modelling language for capturing and analysing transparency requirements amongst stakeholders in a business information system. Our language is based on four reference models which are, in turn, based on our extensive multi-disciplinary analysis of the literature on transparency. As a proof of concept, we apply our modelling language and the analysis enabled by it on a case study of marking exam papers.

Towards engineering transparency as a requirement in socio-technical systems

The improvement and success of socio-technical systems depend on the joint optimisation of both the social and the technical parts. Improving the social part of a socio-technical system is a meticulous task, as social requirements are diverse and dynamic, and they usually evolve with time and context. Information transparency (henceforth, transparency) is one of the social requirements that can affect the overall attitude of the stakeholders present within a socio-technical system, and influence their other social requirements such as privacy, trust, collaboration and non-bias. In this paper, we advocate the need to engineer transparency as a first class requirement, propose a baseline model for transparency and show how this model can be a starting point for the analysis of transparency requirements of different stakeholders. We showcase our on-going research in the modelling and analysis of transparency as a requirement, discuss some of the challenges of transparency requirements elicitation, and present our future work.

Foundations for Transparency Requirements Engineering

[Context & motivation] Transparency is becoming an essential requirement for business information systems. Transparency is advocated to inspire trust,. increase accountability and reduce corruption. However, it may also lead to negative side effects such as information overload, bias and unnecessary pressure on stakeholders. [Question/problem] Despite its distinct characteristics and importance, transparency is still a limitedly explored concept in software engineering and information systems literature, and is often fragmented across adjacent concepts such as privacy, secrecy and regulatory requirements. This limits its representation level and impedes its management. [Principal ideas/results] In this paper, we propose four facets for transparency and illustrate their usefulness in guiding transparency requirements engineering. [Contribution] These facets help clarify the concept of transparency and provide foundations for its management in information systems engineering as a distinct notion. Initiatives like the open data movement add to the timeliness and potential impact of our contribution.

Recommendations on adapting crowdsourcing to problem types

Crowdsourcing is a paradigm which enables and harnesses the power and wisdom of a usually large, diverse crowd in innovation, problem solving and knowledge acquisition. The scale, benefits and application areas of this traditional model are amplified by the advances of information and communication technology such as the advent of Web 2.0, which, at the same time, has increased the complexity and, hence, the need for systematic development approaches. While crowdsourcing has been successfully applied in several projects and de-facto platforms already exist for them, the research on engineering principles, methods and tools for developing a crowdsourcing project is still in the early stages. In this paper, we study the adaptation of crowdsourcing settings to fit the nature of the problem being crowdsourced. As a method, we review the literature and complement that with an online expert survey involving practitioners and researchers active in the field of crowdsourcing. We then interpret the obtained results and identify a set of recommendations on how to set up crowdsourcing to fit each of the five common categories of problems. Our results inform future crowdsourcing developers with best practice experiences on planning and configuring their projects.

Wisdom of the Crowd within enterprises

The Wisdom of the Crowd advocates that decisions collectively made by a diverse crowd could be better than those made by an elite group of experts. The Wisdom of the Crowd puts preconditions on this to work correctly. This concerns the diversity of the crowd, their independence from each other, their decentralisation, and the methods of aggregating their distributed knowledge and forming collective decisions. Although the concept is inspiring, its interpretation and conduct differ significantly amongst enterprises, especially with regard to the culture and style of management. In addition, we still lack reflections on how the Wisdom of the Crowd worked in the practice of modern enterprises. To address this lack of knowledge, this paper conducts an empirical study following a mixed method approach involving 35 senior managers coming from 33 different industries in the UK. In the first phase we interview eight managers and, in the second, we confirm and enhance the results by a survey consisting of open-ended questions and involving 27 other managers. The results shed light on the current practice of the Wisdom of the Crowd in several UK enterprises, which can inform the analysis and design of future software tools meant to aid this emerging decision-making mechanism.

Gamification for Volunteer Cloud Computing

Volunteer cloud computing is a paradigm where idle computing resources owned by a certain user are offered in the cloud to be utilised by others in order to reduce operational costs. Engaging people in volunteer cloud computing is an obstacle which requires novel motivational methods, ideally online. Gamification is a method for increasing people motivation and changing their behaviour towards certain tasks in a non-game context. This position paper advocates that gamification is potentially a means to increase people engagement and retention in volunteer cloud computing projects. As an initial step to reach a systematic application of gamification in such projects, we study the relationship between game mechanics and different categories of volunteers and propose a preliminary mapping that relates these two aspects.