ABSTRACT

Human Computation through crowdsourcing has been an important research area for a
lot of companies. The main objective is to solve tasks that computers cannot do alone,
by using human intelligence. Crowdsourcing presents us the most effective way of
having a large amount of work done in a short amount of time. In this approach, a huge
amount of tasks are processed into a software, which in turn is sent to a crowd of
workers who complete the task. It is generally defined as the process of obtaining
required content through contributions from a group of people. This trend is mostly
available online as it is easy to get workers and process the work online. The workers
involved here are generally volunteers or part-time independent contractors. This method
not only involves division of labour for tedious tasks split for a crowd-based outsourcing
but also to specific requests like crowdfunding and searching solutions for answers. It
can be of great use in astronomy, voting, search engine evaluation, software testing,
image processing, document processing. There is a huge scope of crowdsourcing in
artificial intelligence. The system can be trained using different responses from different
people for a particular task. It is of great importance in developing speech recognition
systems as they rely mostly on the common human responses for general problems. ECommerce websites can use this to improve their search results and also get proper
recommendations. They can test whether the new products are added to the right
categories and ensure there is no mismatch of products.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chap No

TITLE

Page No

INTRODUCTION

CLASSIFICATION

TYPES OF CROWDSOURCING

3.1 Crowdfunding

3.1.1 Types of Crowdfunding

3.2 Microwork

6
11

3.2.1 Amazon Mechanical Turk

13

3.2.2 Universal Human Relevance System

18

3.2.3 Crowdsource

23

3.3 Crowdvoting

27

CONCLUSION

28

REFERENCES

29

LIST OF FIGURES
FIG. NO.

FIG. TITLE

PAGE NO

3.1

Kickstarter Campaign

3.2

IndieGoGo Campaign

3.3

Tilt Campaign

3.4

MicroVentures Campaign

10

3.5

Mturk Homepage

15

3.6

Mturk Qualifications

16

3.7

Mturk HITs

17

3.8

UHRS Login

20

3.9

UHRS Marketplace

21

3.10

UHRS Reports

22

3.11

Crowdsource Workstation

24

3.12

Crowdsource Homepage

25

3.13

Crowdsource Work History

26

3.14

Threadless

27

CROWDSOURCING

1. INTRODUCTION
The word crowdsourcing was coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson,
editors at wired magazine. They represented it as an act of a company or institution
taking a function that was once performed by the employees and then outsourcing it to an
undefined network of people in the form of an open call. It became a popular online,
distributed-problem solving and production model. Crowdsourcing has become
fundamental to the everyday working of many popular internet sites and also, to some
extent, offline workflows. The internet provides a particularly good venue for
crowdsourcing since individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they
are not being physically judged or scrutinized and thus can feel more comfortable
sharing. This ultimately allows for well-designed artistic projects because individuals are
less conscious, or maybe even less aware, of scrutiny towards their work. In an online
atmosphere, more attention can be given to the specific needs of a project, rather than
spending as much time in communication with other individuals. The problems solved
by crowdsourcing can be huge, ranging from huge tasks like processing users sentiments
on twitter on a particular topic like the elections to small tasks finding restaurants near a
given place. The process starts by selecting a vendor. Next, the objective is established.
Now the crowd is engaged into the project. The results obtained are measured and then
deployed. Surveying has also become a lot easier with the help of a large amount of
crowd always ready. The time is greatly reduced to process the results of the survey.
Crowdsourcing is being used in innovative ways by leading companies in every industry.
Various data tasks, big or small, that are typically handled by a companys internal team
may be given to a crowd for review.
An essential function of crowdsourcing is that production capability is scalable to
millions of tasks. Crowdsourcing can either take an explicit or an implicit route. Explicit
crowdsourcing lets users work together to evaluate, share and build different specific
tasks, while implicit crowdsourcing means that users solve a problem as a side effect of
something else they are doing. With explicit crowdsourcing, users can evaluate particular
items like books or webpages, or share by posting products or items. Users can also
build artefacts by providing information and editing other people's work. Implicit
crowdsourcing can take two forms: standalone and piggyback. Standalone allows people
to solve problems as a side effect of the task they are actually doing, whereas piggyback
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takes users' information from a third-party website to gather information. A huge

development in this area is digitizing books using captchas. Captchas are usually used
to test whether a human or a computer is interacting with the webpage. Companies
started developing two parts of captchas, one of which would test the user and the other
would digitize a book. This procedure is pretty effective as the user doesnt know which
word is the testing one and which one is for digitizing. He is more likely to enter both the
words correctly. Piggyback crowdsourcing can be seen most frequently by websites such
as Google that data-mine a user's search history and websites in order to discover
keywords for ads, spelling corrections, and finding synonyms. In the context of
employee engagement, crowdsourcing can be an effective method for gathering
suggestions on how to improve internal operations. The "crowd" in this case is the
employees, who are given the opportunity to share and vote on ideas as well as engage in
a dialogue about those ideas.

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2. CLASSIFICATION
There are eight dimensions involved in the development of a crowdsourcing system.

Degree of manual effort:

The degree of manual effort required has to be measured before the development of the
project. It helps to choose the amount of workers required to complete the project. The
moderators need to set up sustainable software that could tackle the needs of the project.
They need to keep a measure of the results obtained and check them properly.

Role of human users:

The role of human users is assessed during the development phase. This describes what
type of task they are really going to work on. It determines the amount of work to be
done by a particular user and for how much time is he going to work. A users credibility
is checked before he starts working on the project to check if he is really capable of
doing that work.

How to recruit and retain users?

The crowdsourcing system should be able to recruit people based on their credibility and
skill sets. It is important to retain the users that have already joined the project as it is
difficult for new workers to get through and he has to start from the beginning again.
Recruiting can be done through an online exam testing the candidates on the language
and other technical skills required for the project. Social media can be of a great help to
spread awareness on the availability of the project and help people register themselves
for recruitment.

What can users do?

There are endless possibilities of what the users can do to help with a project. They can
be used to test the software, generate content, research and generate leads for the project.
Generally the moderators determine what the users are going to do with the system. They
assign different roles that they think a user can fit in and the users act accordingly.

Combining inputs:
In this step, the inputs obtained from different batches of the results are combined to
generate a proper solution to the problem. This process is very important while
generating content. One batch develops the content and the other one has to check
whether it follows the rules of the existing content. Matching of results can also be done
during categorizing products into different places on the same site.
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How to evaluate?
Software is developed to evaluate the results of the inputs. Various testing mechanisms
are used to do this. The moderator is responsible to check the results at frequent intervals
during the evaluation. He gives a pre-defined set of requirements to the users on how the
work is to be done.

Nature of collaboration:
The users should be able to collaborate properly in order to maintain a proper balance on
the project. There should be a proper understanding on the behalf of both the content
generators and testers on what they are doing and how it will help the project.

Type of target problem:

There are different problems aimed at different types of targets. The users have to get
themselves familiarised with it. A single project may generate different side effects that
may be useful for some other task. Also, demographics are kept in mind while solving
the problems as they may imply differently in other places.

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3. TYPES OF CROWDSOURCING
Crowdsourcing is done through several ways like crowd-funding, micro-tasking, crowdvoting.

3.1 Crowd Funding:

Crowd funding is generally funding a project by getting contributions from a large
number of people. It is usually done through the internet. It starts with the project
initiator, who gives the idea for the project and then continues with the individuals who
support the idea before getting a platform to launch the idea for a real project. As of
2013, the crowdfunding industry has grown over five billion dollars. ArtistShare was the
first platform launched for crowd funding in 2003. Later companies like kickstarter and
indiegogo came in to spread this industry. In 2012, more than one million campaigns
were launched globally.

Benefits:
The crowdfunding campaigns often get huge financial gains. The profile of the producer
boosts when his project is compelling and gives him a good reputation. They can show
that there is a market for their project, if it receives a lot of backing. The involvement of
audiences through forums is also beneficial to the creators. They can get a lot of
feedback, negative and positive, regarding the project and thus helps them build the
project in a better way.

Barriers:
Failure to generate significant amount of interest in the public regarding the project may
seriously impact the reputation of the creators and the project itself. Interactive Digital
Media developers and content producers are reluctant to publicly announce the details of
a project before production due to concerns about idea theft and protecting their IP from
plagiarism. The public is also afraid if the project might turn out to be a scam, if it looks
too good to be true.

3.1.1 Types of Crowdfunding:

Rewards Crowdfunding:
In rewards based crowdfunding, entrepreneurs pre-sell a product or service to launch a
business concept without incurring debt. There are two types of rewards based
crowdfunding. In Keep it all (KIA) type of crowdfunding, the company sets up a
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fundraising goal and it keeps the entire amount regardless of whether they meet their
goals. In All or Nothing (AON) type, the company doesnt keep anything until the goal is
achieved.

Equity Crowdfunding:
Equity crowdfunding is the offering of securities in a business to a group of people for
investment. Because equity crowdfunding involves investment into a commercial
enterprise, it is often subject to securities and financial regulation. Equity crowdfunding
is also referred to as investment crowdfunding and crowd investing. Equity
crowdfunding is a mechanism that enables broad groups of investors to fund startup
companies and small businesses in return for equity. Investors give money to a business
and receive ownership of a small piece of that business.

Real Estate Crowdfunding:

Real estate crowdfunding is the online pooling of capital from investors to fund
mortgages secured by real estate, such as "fix and flip" redevelopment of distressed or
abandoned properties, and equity for commercial and residential projects, acquisition of
pools of distressed mortgages, home buyer down payments and similar real estate related
outlets. Investment, via specialised online platforms, is limited to accredited investors.

Highest Grossing Campaigns:

Star citizen, an online space trading and combat video game, developed by Chris
Roberts, is the highest grossing crowdsourcing campaign of all time. It raised around 61
million dollars beating pebbles record of 10 million dollars.

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Kickstarter:

Fig.3.1 A Kickstarter Campaign

Kickstarter is one of the most used crowdfunding platforms. It is based in United States.
Its mission is to help bring creativity and innovation to life. Kickstarter has reportedly
received over $1 billion in pledges from 5.7 million donors to fund 135,000 projects,
which include films, music, stage shows, comics, journalism, video games, and foodrelated projects. People who back Kickstarter projects are offered tangible rewards and
special experiences in exchange for their pledges. This model traces its roots to
subscription model of arts patronage, where artists would go directly to their audiences
to fund their work.

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IndieGoGo:

Fig.3.2 An IndieGoGo Campaign

Indiegogo is a way for people all over the world to join forces to make ideas happen.
Since 2008, millions of contributors have empowered hundreds of thousands of
inventors, musicians, do-gooders, filmmakers and other game-changers to bring big
dreams to life. The site runs on a rewards-based system, meaning donors, investors, or
customers who are willing to order a project or a product can donate and receive a gift
rather than an equity stake in the company.

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Tilt:

Fig.3.3 A Tilt Campaign

Tilt makes it easy for groups and communities to collect, fundraise, or pool money
securely and effectively online. In addition to helping social organizers, the company is
legally certified in securing fundraisers for non-profit organizations. Tilt has passed the
most stringent level of security certification available and has earned PCI Level 1
compliant status. Tilts principal product is a group-funding platform that allows users to
contribute to and create campaigns of their choosing.

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MicroVentures:

Fig.3.4 A MicroVentures Campaign

MicroVentures is an equity crowdfunding website offering investments in early stage
companies. MicroVentures is one of the financial industry's first organizations which
merges crowdfunding with the venture capital industry. The San Francisco, CA and
Austin, TX based firm provides an opportunity for angel investors to invest in start-ups
alongside Venture Capitalists, often at the same terms. We conduct detailed due diligence
on start-ups and if approved we help them raise capital from angel investors.

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3.2 Microwork:
Microwork is a crowdsourcing platform in which there is a series of small tasks which
together comprise a large unified project, and are completed by many people over the
Internet. Microwork is considered the smallest unit of work in a virtual assembly line.

Microtasking:
Microtasking is the process of splitting a job into its component microwork and
distributing this work over the Internet. Since the inception of microwork, many online
services have been developed that specialize in different types of microtasking. Most of
them rely on a large, voluntary workforce composed of Internet users from around the
world.

Uses:

Processing a large amount of data

Search engine evaluation
Lead generation
Data Tagging
Categorizing products in shopping websites

Importance:
Microtasking services, as they are implemented currently, allow their workers to work
from home. Workers complete tasks on a voluntary basis; other than with time-sensitive
jobs like call centres, they choose which jobs to complete and when they complete them.
Workers can work from anywhere in the world and receive payment directly over the
Internet. Because workers can reside anywhere in the world, microwork can provide job
opportunities with large Fortune 500 companies and many smaller companies for people
living in poverty who would otherwise not be able to make a living wage. Through
services like Samasource, work and wealth are distributed from companies in developed
countries to a large volume of families in poverty, especially women and youth who
would otherwise not be able to generate income.
For employers, microtasking services provide a platform to quickly get a project online
and start receiving results from many workers at the same time. The services offer large
workforces which complete tasks concurrently, so large volumes of small tasks can be
completed quickly. Furthermore, since each task is discretely contained and tasks are
usually simple in nature, each individual worker does not have to be fully trained or have
complete knowledge of the project to contribute work. Under United States tax law,
workers are treated as independent contractors, which means employers do not have to
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withhold taxes, and they only need to file a form 1099-MISC with the Internal Revenue
Service if a given worker earns more than $600 per year. Workers are responsible for
paying income taxes, including self-employment tax that would otherwise be paid by
their employer.

Workers:
The workers doing microwork are independent contractors and are not treated as
employees of the company. They are not eligible for any benefits like health insurance
and retirement benefits. As the project is huge, workers have a little idea of where their
work is actually going to be implemented. Their basic pay rate is less than two dollars
per hour on an average. Because global services outsource work to underdeveloped or
developing regions, competitive pricing and task completion could result in the lower
wages. The San Francisco-based company, CrowdFlower, has facilitated outsourcing
digital tasks to countries with poverty to stimulate their local economies.

3.2.1 Amazon Mechanical Turk:

Amazon mechanical turk is a marketplace for businesses or requesters who use human
intelligence to perform various tasks. The tasks posted are referred to as HITs (Human
Intelligence Tasks). Here workers set up their own working hours and work only on tasks
that they like to do. There are no obligations for them to do a particular task. The
requesters are not responsible to file for the taxes. The workers report their income as
self employment income. The average income on this site is around one dollar per hour.
They also have some qualifications for the workers in case they want to qualify for
particular projects. The qualifications can be a series of questions, performing tasks or
request users to have historically responded to a minimum percentage of their hit sent
correctly. They can, at anytime, reject the workers hit, if they dont like it. This may
affect the workers credibility on the site and he may be blocked.
Amazon mechanical turk allows more than one user to give response to the same hit.
When the majority of users give the same answer, the hit is automatically approved.
Amazon makes the mturk application programming interface available to the
programmers. This enables them to submit the work, retrieve completed work and accept
or reject the work. There are various browser extensions and scripts available for the
users that are designed to simply the experience and give quick access to the projects.
Employees are free to work on tasks that they find most interesting, those they like to
complete or the best paid. Applicants are free to define the payments. When the aim is to
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attract a high number of employees and increase performance, rates are higher. If there is
more flexibility in completing the task, the rates are lower. Payments in Mechanical Turk
are made in cooperation with Amazon Payments.

Use case scenarios:

Classifying objects found in images by satellite.

Labelling objects to make search easier.
Auditing images for inappropriate content.
Identifying duplicate products on the site.
Categorizing the product attributes.
Surveying
Transcription of podcasts
Translation of various languages
Classification of search engine results.
Write comments on various blogs.
Search specific fields in various documents.
Identifying email address of various websites.
Finding contact information and address of the website.

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Homepage:

Fig.3.5 Mturk Homepage

The webpage above, is a summary of the way the mechanical turk actually works, for
both, the requesters and workers.

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HITs:

Fig.3.6 Mturk HITs

The webpage above, shows the various kinds of hits available in the platform. It gives
the information about the requester, number of hits available, hit expiration date, time
allotted for each hit and the payment for each hit completed. Users can also search for
the hits based on the pay user the search box available at the top of the page.

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Qualifications:

Fig.3.7 Mturk Qualifications

The webpage above, gives the list of qualifications available for the user. It lists the
number of users already qualified. Once a user completes the qualification successfully,
he can work on the projects based on the qualification.

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3.2.2 Universal Human Relevance System (uhrs):

Uhrs is primarily based on improving the search results on bing by rating the webpages
that show up on search of some query. A webpage that definitely serves the purpose of
the search should be labelled as perfect. On the other hand, spammy webpages and
pages that are not at all related to the search term are labelled as bad. The landing
pages of the search results are checked whether they are able to satisfy the search needs.
The important part to be checked here is the intent of the query. The range of the landing
page should provide a proper scope to the user. The websites trustworthiness is also
checked during this period. There is a rating matrix for users to grade web search results.
The rating options available are Perfect, Excellent, Good, Fair and bad.
1.) Perfect
The LP is the definitive or official page that strongly satisfies the most likely intent.
The document says that a Perfect landing page should appear as the top search result.
It also says that only one landing page will typically deserve a Perfect rating, but for
some generic queries (such as loans or insurance) there will not be a Perfect landing
page. A Perfect page should address the intent of at least 50 percent of searchers.
2.) Excellent
Bing describes this as a landing page that strongly satisfies a very likely or most likely
intent and closely matches the requirements of the query in scope, freshness, authority,
market and language. Users finding an Excellent landing page could end their search
here and move on. An Excellent page should address the intent of at least 25 percent of
searchers.
An example in the document is that Barnes & Nobles home page is an Excellent result
for the search query buy books.
3.) Good
A Good landing page moderately satisfies a very likely or most likely intent, or strongly
satisfies a likely intent. Bing says most searchers wouldnt be completely satisfied with
one of these pages and would continue searching. A Good page should address the intent
of at least 10 percent of searchers.
4.) Fair
This rating applies to pages that are only useful to some searchers. A Fair page weakly
satisfies a very likely or most likely intent, moderately satisfies a likely intent, or

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strongly satisfies an unlikely intent. A Fair page addresses the intent of at least one
percent of searchers.
5.) Bad
In addition to being useful to almost no one and not satisfying user intent, this rating
applies to a web page that uses spam techniques or misleadingly provides content
from other sites, as well as to parked domains and pages that attempt to install malware.
A Bad page addresses the intent of less than one percent of searchers.
The document goes into some detail on additional ratings like Detrimental, which
applies (in part) to web documents that display adult-only content, and No Judgment
for pages that cant be accessed for a variety of reasons.
There also have other tasks like judging and categorizing queries, identifying whether the
page has inappropriate content, judging documents and mapping queries to search terms.

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Login:

Fig.3.8 UHRS Login

There are two ways to login to the uhrs platform. One is by signing in through the
windows login id given to the user by the client, and the other is for the developers to test
whether the platform is working properly or not.

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Marketplace:

Fig.3.9 UHRS Marketplace

The marketplace lists all the HitApps available. For every project, there are guidelines
given. The user can preview the task before he aims for the qualification. The
qualification consists of ten tasks and the user has to get at least 8 of them correctly to
qualify. There are three attempts available to qualify for the project. Once the user
qualifies, he/she can click the start judging button to start doing the tasks.

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Reports:

Fig.3.10 UHRS Reports

The "my reports" page gives the payment report of the user. It lists the number of hits
done by the user, the duration of time of judgement, the potential earnings, and
incentives if any. It also lists the spam and rta scores. The spam score is the measure of
accuracy of the user. The answer to the spam tasks are already known to the system. The
rtas are the tasks that give you an explanation if you go wrong with them. Most of the
tasks need at least 75 percent accuracy or 0.75 score.

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3.2.3 Crowdsource:
CrowdSource is the industry leader in a multi-billion dollar market, providing clients
with on-demand access to a skilled and scalable workforce. They manage crowd-based
talent to deliver content, moderation and transcription solutions to enterprise clients
worldwide. They have a 24/7 access to thousands of workers on demand. They specialize
in writing and editing product descriptions for companies like overstock and staples.
They also have other tasks like product attribute categorization, website categorization
and classifying images. They work through amazon mechanical turk, odesk and their
own workstation. The workers can get paid through amazon payments, paypal and odesk.
The best part of this site is that the workers signing in through paypal receive daily
payments.

Working:
1. Workers are trained and tested before they start the tasks.
2. The workers can only view the tasks for which they have achieved qualification.
3. Each task has an efficient and proper worker interface. Clear instructions and
efficient UI's increase throughput and maintain quality.
4. There are smart quality controls that ensure the work is correct. The work done is
constantly checked by trusted reviewers before it is sent to the client.
5. There are various performance based rewards and incentives for workers.

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Workstation:

Fig.3.11 Crowdsource Workstation

There are three ways to login to the workstation. The first is through the amazon account
that was previously associated with amazon mechanical turk. The other two ways include
paypal and odesk. The users get paid through the respective platforms.

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Homepage:

Fig.3.12 Crowdsource Homepage

The home page gives the projects currently available. The workers can only see the
projects that they are qualified to do. The project details list the number of tasks
available, the payment for each task completed and the time available to complete the
tasks.

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Work History:

Fig.3.13 Crowdsource Work History

The past work page lists the total tasks the user has done. The pending column represents
the work that is still under review. The owed column indicates that the work is approved
and the user will receive the payment for the tasks. The earnings column list the
payments received by the user in the specific project until now. The user is often given
feedback on his work, which is displayed at the top-left corner of the page.

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3.3 Crowd Voting:

Crowd voting is done when the company wants to gather a large amount of opinion or
judgements on a certain topic. Dominos Pizza has crowdsourced a new pizza design
using the social media channels. Coca cola has crowdsourced a design for their bottles
online. Heineken and Sam Adams have crowdsourced a new beer and song respectively
using various social media channels.

Fig.3.14 Threadless
Threadless.com is a website where users upload their own designs. The design is then
scored on a scale of 1 to 5. If there is a good rating, then they start printing the design on
the t-shirt and the user can purchase once its done.

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4. CONCLUSION
Crowdsourcing has the potential to be a great problem-solving mechanism for
government and non-profit use. Crowdsourcing systems provide researchers the ability to
gather a large amount of data that they might not get access to locally, which in turn
improves the quality of work. The buyers of crowdsourcing gain a lot by getting tasks
done at a cheap price and in a short amount of time. They dont have to look for
employees. It is more convenient and gives a lot of value for their money spent. They get
improved quality and productivity. They get proper feedback for their project. The
crowdsourcing participants in turn get high cash compensations. They get flexible work
hours. They enhance the professional portfolio of the worker. Researchers also get a
good platform for innovation through crowdsourcing. Markets can be studied better by
getting direct opinions from the people. Today, crowdsourcing has transferred mainly to
the Internet. The Internet provides a particularly good venue for crowdsourcing since
individuals tend to be more open in web-based projects where they are not being
physically judged or scrutinized and thus can feel more comfortable sharing. This
ultimately allows for well-designed artistic projects because individuals are less
conscious, or maybe even less aware, of scrutiny towards their work. In an online
atmosphere, more attention can be given to the specific needs of a project, rather than
spending as much time in communication with other individuals.

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5. REFERENCES

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crowdsourcing
Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/
IndieGoGo: https://www.indiegogo.com/
Tilt: https://www.tilt.com/
MicroVentures: https://microventures.com/
Amazon Mechanical Turk: https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome
Universal Human Relevance System: https://prod.uhrs.playmsn.com/
Crowdsource: http://www.crowdsource.com/
Threadless: https://www.threadless.com/

DEPT OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

(AUTONOMOUS)

28

MREC