Title
Intervention Strategies for Increasing Engagement in Crowdsourcing: Platform, Predictions, and Experiments.
Abstract
Volunteer-based crowdsourcing depend critically on maintaining the engagement of participants. We explore a methodology for extending engagement in citizen science by combining machine learning with intervention design. We first present a platform for using real-time predictions about forthcoming disengagement to guide interventions. Then we discuss a set of experiments with delivering different messages to users based on the proximity to the predicted time of disengagement. The messages address motivational factors that were found in prior studies to influence users' engagements. We evaluate this approach on Galaxy Zoo, one of the largest citizen science application on the web, where we traced the behavior and contributions of thousands of users who received intervention messages over a period of a few months. We found sensitivity of the amount of user contributions to both the timing and nature of the message. Specifically, we found that a message emphasizing the helpfulness of individual users significantly increased users' contributions when delivered according to predicted times of disengagement, but not when delivered at random times. The influence of the message on users' contributions was more pronounced as additional user data was collected and made available to the classifier.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
IJCAI
Psychological intervention,World Wide Web,Helpfulness,Crowdsourcing,Computer science,Citizen science,Disengagement theory,Classifier (linguistics)
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
4
0.45
References 
Authors
11
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Avi Segal1366.83
Ya'akov (Kobi) Gal250144.49
Ece Kamar357748.11
Eric Horvitz494021058.25
Alex Bowyer540.45
Grant Miller6674.09