Eliciting and focusing geographic volunteer work

Abstract

Open content communities such as wikis derive their value from the work done by users. However, a key challenge is to elicit work that is sufficient and focused where needed. We address this challenge in a geographic open content community, the Cyclopath bicycle route finding system. We devised two techniques to elicit and focus user work, one using familiarity to direct work opportunities and another visually highlighting them. We conducted a field experiment, finding that (a) the techniques succeeded in eliciting user work, (b) the distribution of work across users was highly unequal, and (c) user work benefitted the community (reducing the length of the average computed route by 1 kilometer).

Putting ubiquitous crowd-sourcing into context

“…For example, Cyclopath is being successfully used to digitally map route information for bicyclists in Minneapolis. The system has been widely studied by the academic community, both in terms of its design and rationale [18], its effectiveness [20] and in terms of user's participation and behavioural analysis [19,15,16]. In [19], for example, the authors investigated the techniques and motivations that lead to an increased amount of volunteered geographic information in Cyclopath.…”

“…The system has been widely studied by the academic community, both in terms of its design and rationale [18], its effectiveness [20] and in terms of user's participation and behavioural analysis [19,15,16]. In [19], for example, the authors investigated the techniques and motivations that lead to an increased amount of volunteered geographic information in Cyclopath. They found that visually highlighting contribution opportunities and asking users to work on an area that they are mostly familiar with, lead to better coverage.…”

Evaluating compliance-without-pressure techniques for increasing participation in online communities

“…The key passage in this email was: You will be presented with a area on the map. Read launched an experimental trial (the procedure as well as the code for conducting trials was adapted from [29]):…”

“…As of May 17, 2011, Cyclopath had 3,232 registered users and visits from 69,754 different IP addresses. Cyclopath has served as an excellent research platform for prior research on user behavior in social production communities, including studying efficient ways of eliciting contributions [29], user lifecycles [27] and specialization of contributions [26].…”

“…If extracted, these tags could provide more options for users to customize their routes. Further, this task could be performed by any person, regardless of his/her familiarity with the note or the area on the map where the note was applied (just like the task of fixing intersections [29]). Hence we chose to ask Cyclopath's users to do the task of extracing tags from notes.…”