Crowdsourcing Research

Currently, we investigate these issues in three streams of research:

The motivation to join and participate in online communities
Why do people contribute to a task without getting something in return?
The literature on open source development lists several reasons for these contributions, such as altruism, intrinsic motivation, expected future returns (such as job opportunities and pay increases), and the fulfillment of personal needs. Apart from that there are also large online groups in which individuals’ contributions are neither marginal nor restricted to the project, but actually represent inherent value (e.g., contributions made to innovation-related tasks). These communities are often designed as competitive instead of collaborative communities, in the sense that members compete for a reward instead of collaborate on the task.
Aim. This research aims to investigate how motivations to contribute to a task are influenced by (a) the design choices of an online community, such as potential degree of interaction between individuals and sense of community created, (b) monetary reward systems, and (c) the assignment of intellectual property rights. This research will look at the larger picture of online groups, of which open source communities represent only one of the possible ways to design an online community and organize task groups within it.

The processes in online communities
On most tasks, groups have the potential to outperform individuals, because they can combine the skills and knowledge of their members. In reality, groups hardly ever realize their full potential. Apart from faulty task designs, detrimental group processes (such as subgroup formation, social loafing and free-riding) are often responsible for this. These processes are especially likely to occur in diverse groups. While diversity is one of the strengths of large groups it will also increase the probability of group processes that hamper group performance.
Aim. We investigate which group processes, both beneficial and detrimental for group performance, play a role specifically in large groups. After identifying them, we will focus on investigating circumstances to reinforce the occurrence of performance-enhancing group processes – and eliminate performance-hampering ones.

The innovative performance of online communities
Research on small groups has shown that for many tasks the size of the group does not have a positive affect on task performance by the group. This seems to be a counterintuitive result, as for most tasks the underlying performance logic dictates that the larger the group, the greater the potential performance. In fact, in reality we do observe large groups outperforming both small groups and individuals. As was identified above, group processes play an important role in understanding the actual performance of groups; however, by themselves group processes cannot offer a complete picture. Both the contextual situation in which a task is performed as well as the design of the task are at the core of determining the actual task performance of groups.
Aim. We investigate two topics: First, we find out for which tasks large online groups are better suited than are traditional work groups, and why this is so. Second, we look at how the contextual situation and the design characteristics of the task (e.g., collaborative or competitive task design) will influence the groups’ performance. We are specifically interested in the interaction of the online environment and the aforementioned group processes in large groups.