Recently, I'm starting a research project about "crowdsourcing" and I've two questions about the nature of crowdsourcing.
1. Is it possible to illustrate crowdsourcing as a graph? I mean is it true to consider crowdsourcing members as network nodes which are interrelated?
2. Is it possible to monitor the activities of these members (nodes)? I mean is it true to monitor a crowdsourcing process as a project control problem and also do some time studies about these nodes?
Potentially, yes. It is possible. You have to decide what kind of relationship you are going to establish to track the interaction. For example, nodes can be individuals and ties the tasks in which they have collaborated. This can also be analyzed longitudinally.
This is an example of research, linking network analysis and crowdsourcing Conference Paper Network Analysis on Provenance Graphs from a Crowdsourcing Application
Hi.,
Crowdsourcing is used as a collective intellectual gathering of information that comes from the public and is then used to complete a business-related task. In other words, businesses use an outsourcing task that's usually performed by an employee, staff, or contractor, to deliver to a crowd of people.
Uber, which pairs available drivers with people who need rides, is an example of crowdsourced transportation. While crowdsourcing often involves breaking up a big job, businesses sometimes use crowdsourcing to assess how multiple people perform at the same job.. With crowdsourcing, large work projects are broken into smaller chunks, or microtasks, and then divvied out to tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people for fast, efficient completion. In this sense, crowdsourcing is based on the principle that many hands make light work.
For More info:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1602.07063
In viewing this for social network analysis you will need to select your community boundary in order to see anything meaningful. What I mean here is that, for a crowdsourced project, you will be looking at a lot of nodes (funders) connected to a single node (project), which does not really give you much of a network view to analyse. It will be a central node with hundreds of individual nodes connected to it.
However, if you were to step out and assess each funder as, say, a Twitter account, you could then see which funders follow other funders, what they tweet about and so on. This could lead to some interesting data and relationship connections.
In summary, you need your nodes to mean more than just 'a funder of the project'.
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