The four pillars of crowdsourcing: A reference model

• Published in: 2014 IEEE Eighth International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science (RCIS) pp. 1 - 12
• Main Authors: Hosseini, Mahmood, Phalp, Keith, Taylor, Jacqui, Ali, Raian
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2014
• Subjects: Complexity theory; Crowdsourcing; crowdsourcing configuration; crowdsourcing taxonomy; Feature extraction; Organizations; Privacy; Taxonomy
• ISSN: 2151-1349
• DOI: 10.1109/RCIS.2014.6861072

Crowdsourcing is an emerging business model where tasks are accomplished by the general public; the crowd. Crowdsourcing has been used in a variety of disciplines, including information systems development, marketing and operationalization. It has been shown to be a successful model in recommendation systems, multimedia design and evaluation, database design, and search engine evaluation. Despite the increasing academic and industrial interest in crowdsourcing, there is still a high degree of diversity in the interpretation and the application of the concept. This paper analyses the literature and deduces a taxonomy of crowdsourcing. The taxonomy is meant to represent the different configurations of crowdsourcing in its main four pillars: the crowdsourcer, the crowd, the crowdsourced task and the crowdsourcing platform. Our outcome will help researchers and developers as a reference model to concretely and precisely state their particular interpretation and configuration of crowdsourcing.