Digital Tools and Mass Participation

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Prpic, et al., (2015) listed four types of crowdsourcing alternatives these are Crowd-voting, Idea crowdsourcing, Micro-task crowdsourcing and Solution crowdsourcing. Crowd-voting is an method where an organisation request choices between alternatives and then aggregate the votes. One example of this is American Idol. Idea crowdsourcing is when an organisation invites opinions for small or big questions and then elvauates the proposed ideas.When an organisation breaks a problem into smaller jobs and then re-assembles the completed task, this activity is referred to as Mirco-task crowdsourcing. Solution crowdsouring on the other hand is when invitation and tests contributions are sent out by an organisation for very specific problems and then adopts the best non-falsifiablel solutions.

Prpic, et al., (2015) referred to two of the forms of crowdsourcing that relies on aggressive contributions as the primary process. These two forms are crowd voting and micro-task crowdsourcing. In crowdvoting organisations pose an issue to a crowd and aggregate the subjective responses as devired from crowd partcipation to arrive at a decision. Prediction markets also apply this method where the wisdom of the crowd is utilized through crowd voting. Instead of just adding up votes however these markets arrive at specific predictions that normally exceed the accuracy of experts by averging the independent responses of crowd participants.

Mirco-task crowdsourcing according Prpic, et al., (2015) is the process by which an organisation engage a crowd to undertake work that is often unachievable through standard procedures due its size or complexity. There maybe a need for an organisation to assemble a large data set, labeled and tag numerous photos or translate documents, dividing these work into mirco-task will allow these hugh undertakings to be completed much faster, efficiently and more cost effective.

Types of Crowdsourcing

Crowd Voting

There are number of digital tools in crowd voting, according to the Qmarkets (2017), crowd voting is a method used by organizations to seize the community’s viewpoint on different topics. Crowd voting is a crowdsourcing method that offers an intellignet, accurate and cost-effective way to prioritize ideas and concepts. These ideas and concepts are then utilized to determine which products to develop, which marketing concepts to use or which solutions to implement. Qmarkets offers a number of online crowd voting solutions. These solutions are as follows:

- Community Ratings – This solution provides the users with the options of selecting a thumbs up/down, Rating on a Scale or selection between two concepts. This methods is used for large audience and does not require much time or effort

- Score-card Rating – This is a evaluation tool that requires participants to cast their votes on several criteria related to the same topic. Each criterion can be allocated a weight depending on its importance

- Token Voting – This is a rating method that is a effective way to choose between a closed list of ideas and concepts. Using gamification techniques which can assist in attracting users and increasing their engagemnet in the process

- Idea Tournament - This rating method is for prioritizing a large set of ideas or concepts by a large audience

- Prediction Markets – Used as a rating method where a virtual stock market is simulated were partcipants are presented with a set of ideas/concepts. Each concept performs similar to a stock and participants need to invest in the concept they believe will be successful .

- These tools are available through an online platform and provide the users with advantages such as efficiency and cost effectiveness, insight from potential markets and increase brand awareness.

Mirco-task crowdsourcing

The logic behind mirco-task crowdsourcing according to Girotto (2016), is to use humans to perform small tasks that can be easily done by humans, but cannot be easily or accurately done by computers. According to Difallah, et al.(2015) while data availability generally increases, due to imprefections in its quality , manual pre-processing is often required before the data is of any value or to support decisions. Therefore, outsourcing data-processing task on the Internet to a large crowd of individuals has become increasingly popular. Referred to as Human Intelligence Task(HITs) by Difallah, et al.(2015) platforms have been developed to serve as a place where the crowd(workers) willingingly performs small tasks in exchange for small monetary rewards and work providers( also know as requesters) meet.

Difallah, et al.(2015) explained the mirco-task crowdsourcing process where as the requesters firstly design the HIT based on their data and required task, next they publish batches of HITs on the crowdsourcing platform specifying their requirements and the monetary amount rewarded to workers in exchange of the completion of each HIT. Workers voluntatarily perform the published HITs then complete the tasks and submit their work back to the requester who obtains the desired results and pay workers accordingly. Micro-tasking has grown exponentially over the last five years and arguably this is due to the large amount of data that is now available. Companies seeking to optimizie all their business processes according to Difallah, et al.(2015) consider this data as a key asset.

Connecting workers globally, the internet allows companies like Amazon Mechanical Turk to provide platform where businesses are allowed to break jobs into small parts and offer them to people willing to perform these tasks. According Reese & Heath (2016) there are about 500,000 contract workers available globally who works from a few minutes to 24 hours a day.

Idea and Solution Crowdsourcing

When an organisations invites opinions for small or big questions and then evaluate the proposed ideas, this according to Prpic, et al., (2015) as idea crowdsourcing. In idea crowdsourcing organisations seek the creativity from a crowd, hoping to leverage its diversity to generate unique solutions to problem/issues. Examples of idea crowdsourcing online where ‘Theadless’, a artist community and e-commerce website solicited the crowd for creative T-shirt design and then internally selected the most suitable ones to be produced for sale. Another company , Cine Coup sought movie ideas in the form of trailers and the vet them ,evenually selected the ultimate on to be financed for production.

In solution crowdsourcing as outlined by Prpic, et al., (2015), organisations pose