Designing and deploying a ‘compact’ crowdsourcing infrastructure: A case study

Abstract

The Web 2.0 phenomenon of ‘crowdsourcing’ is now an accepted means of enabling ‘democratic’ content creation and the validation and authorization of content online. However, the technical implementation of crowdsourcing systems is not without its challenges. Systems designed to accommodate extremely large crowds are easier to equip with techniques that exploit the signal to noise ratio to derive useful output. For smaller groups it is often less a matter of filtering out noise and more a matter of filtering out single voices clamouring to dominate discussion through barnstorming tactics or system circumvention. This article discusses and analyses a case study focused on the design and deployment of a ‘compact’ crowdsourcing infrastructure, a design specifically intended to subvert and overcome the shortcomings of applying well-proven large-scale collaborative methods to a recognizably smaller group.