Crowdsourcing the research process

Abstract

Research is a high skill and resource intensive activity, both in time and effort, and often follows an ad hoc pro- cess. In a research process, its often unclear what in- gredients; or what recipe or process, which if repeated produces a publishable paper. Meanwhile, experienced researchers with novel ideas are constrained with lim- ited time and funding resources; and motivated students with exceptional skill-sets lack direction or research mentor. In this proposal, I introduce a research direction which explores the possibility of expert crowdsourcing the research process, by connecting mentor with student crowd. The process would allow mentors to systemati- cally use operators such as split, merge, remove or add on project ideas, code or students to manage research process and crowd. The process would include series of research phases like, brainstorming, paper-pencil pro- totyping, development and user-evaluation to produce publishable results. Encouraged by prior pilot experi- ment findings, my doctoral research examines the pos- sibility of crowdsourcing the research process using op- erators along the research phase, while solving resource and opportunity constraints among mentor and crowd. Keywords