Abstract. 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.
Transparency is a key emerging requirement in modern businesses and their information systems. Transparency refers to the information which flows amongst stakeholders for the purpose of informed decision-making and taking the right action. Transparency is generally associated with positive connotations such as trust and accountability. However, it has been shown that it could have adverse effects such as information overload and affecting decisions objectiveness. This calls for systematic approaches for transparency to ensure its cost-effectiveness and avoid such adverse side effects. This is especially true considering that the relatively few works in the literature on transparency requirements have focused mainly on making information available and accessible and have paid little focus on the information receivers' side and making it meaningful for them. In this paper, we reflect on our previous research on transparency and its multi-faceted constructs and review multi-disciplinary conceptualisation and propose four reference models which are meant to form a holistic conceptual baseline for transparency requirements in information systems. These reference models cover transparency actors, transparency meaningfulness, transparency usefulness, and information quality in transparency. We also discuss the interdependencies amongst these four reference models and their implications for requirements engineers and information system analysts. As a proof of concept, we analyse a mainstream transparency document, the United Kingdom Freedom of Information Act, in the light of our reference models and demonstrate the need to consider transparency more holistically and the need to include the information receiver's perspective and the inter-relations amongst various properties and constituents of transparency as well. We then highlight areas of improvement informed by our analysis.
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.
Gamification refers to the use of game elements in a business context to change users' behaviours, mainly increasing motivation towards a certain task or a strategic objective. Gamification has received a good deal of emphasis in both academia and industry across various disciplines and application areas. Despite the increasing interest, we still need a unified and holistic picture on how to engineer gamification, including the meaning of the term, its development process, the stakeholders and disciplines which need to be involved in it, and the concerns and risks that an ad-hoc design could raise for both businesses and users. To address this need, this article reports on empirical research which involved reviewing the literature and a range of gamification techniques and applications as secondary research, and an expert opinion study of two phases, qualitative and quantitative, as primary research. Based on the results, we provide a body of knowledge about gamification and point-out good practice principles and areas of gamification that are debatable and need further investigation.
Abstract-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.
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