Incentives for Crowdsourcing

This whitepaper provides an overview perspective on the foundation of crowdsourcing and crowdsensing, detailing related notions such as collective intelligence and citizen science. As all crowd-based initiatives are usually built upon a core of volunteers participating to an “open call” to perform tasks, crowdsensing in particular relies on the willingness of participants to invest time and interest in a cause, sacrifice limited resources of their mobile devices, and provide implicit or explicit efforts, including ignoring risks that impact the privacy of their data. This document describes how incentives and rewarding schemes are adopted in this context to attract a community of users and to keep it engaged. Two incentive schemes in particular are described, both of which have been developed within the CROWD4ROADS project: a game mode that transforms collected data into generated terrain for a 2D platform game and a voucher exchange system that acts as a platform for any initiative for the common good. Both incentive schemes are fully anonymous and integrate within a fully anonymous data collection scheme.