Crowdsourcing and Crowd Participation: Incentives in the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A Community

Introduction

The challenge of crowdsourcing is nowadays becoming mainstream (Howe 2008; Geiger et al., 2011). In this domain, many online communities (apart from social communities) use crowd participation to manage their activities quickly and efficiently. But effective crowdsourcing solutions require activities that both fulfill the communities administrators’ needs and, by utilizing various motivation mechanisms, account for individual contributors’ needs. Thus, the understanding of the incentives that spur users to contribute are critical to design crowdsourcing applications (Cuel & Zamarian, 2014). This study draws upon recent studies that focus on extrinsic and intrinsic incentive mechanisms employed for the engagement, the retention and the motivation of the “crowd”, that voluntary participate in web 2.0. (e.g. Acar & Van den ende, 2011; Bakici et al., 2011; Nov et al., 2011). The authors distinguish between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (e.g. Ryan & Deci, 2000; Rogstadius et al., 2011). As known, intrinsic motivation implies that people perform an activity because they find it interesting and refers to do something for its inherent satisfactions (e.g. Gagné & Deci, 2005; Calder & Staw, 1975). Extrinsic motivation is based on a push that leads to a separable outcome and implies that people perform an activity for the sake of receiving monetary or non monetary rewards (e.g. Frey & Oberholzer-Gee, 1997; Deci, 1971).

In this study, the authors set up a field experiment with real users to analyze a concrete situation, in order to understand which types of incentives are useful to engage users to produce contents for the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A (Organization of Cultural Heritage for Smart Tourism and Real-time Accessibility) community and to better address a specific behaviour. The identification of adequate sets of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives is a crucial point to outline crowdsourcing community.

This work is part of an ongoing study on smart city platforms. OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A is the Italian research project meant to develop a set of technological solutions towards a smarter valorisation of material and immaterial Cultural Heritage of Campania Region, and in particular of the city of Naples (Italy), for the benefit, use and enjoyment of tourists, visitors and citizens, according to the principles of sustainability and eco compatibility. The project falls within the field “Smart Culture and Tourism” and it is funded by PON (the Operative National Project for Research and Competitiveness 2007-2013 - Smart Cities and Communities, Smart Tourism & Smart Mobility, Asse II, Support for Innovation). OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A is a crowdsourcing community that promotes user-generated contents for cultural and touristic consumption. Thus, citizens, tourists, institutions, associations, operators participate together to build a virtual place of inclusion, social innovation and contents production to better the value of the city of Naples.

The rest of the chapter is organised as follows. In the first section the authors explain the theoretical background, analysing various studies on motivation. In particular, they present a review of the literature on incentive mechanisms in the domain of online communities. Drawing on the theoretical framework, in the second section, they found their hypothesis and present their field experiment. They explain methods, data collection and measures. In the last section they discuss results and recommendations of the study and present limitations and future research directions. Finally they conclude presenting some implications for research and practice. Moreover they try to explain emerging issue needed to create a model of incentive mechanisms that could be used in the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A community.