Human Collaboration on Crowdsourcing Platforms – a Content Analysis

Abstract

The crowdsourcing phenomenon offers the opportunity to address an open call to the crowd. Crowd workers may work together to find a solution that satisfies the open call. One of the major benefits for a crowdsourcer is the pool of crowd workers that can be accessed over crowdsourcing platforms. However, the produced outcomes of crowd workers are often on a low level with weak elaboration and quality. The key to high quality work is the collaboration of crowd workers. This has already been addressed in the collaboration process design framework for crowdsourcing (CPDF). At this point we position this work and widen our view by conducting a content analysis on crowdsourcing platforms in order to understand the collaboration of crowd workers on real world crowdsourcing platforms better as well as investigate the weaknesses of the collaboration process design framework for crowdsourcing to improve work practices. By doing so, we redesign the CPDF based on the results of the content analysis and present an improved collaboration process of crowd workers within the CPDF.