Crowdsourcing and crowd participation: Incentives in the OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A community

This chapter provides reflections on extrinsic and intrinsic incentive mechanisms, in order to explore the extent to which they are able to motivate users in starting community building processes. The authors present some results of the research project OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A (ORganization of Cultural HEritage for Smart Tourism and Real-time Accessibility) that means to develop a crowdsourcing community directed towards a smarter valorisation of the city of Naples (Italy). Successful crowdsourcing solutions require activities that both fulfill the communities’ administrators’ needs and account for individual contributors’ needs. Thus, analyzing the incentives that spur users to contribute are critical to designing crowdsourcing applications. The authors set up a field experiment in order to understand which types of incentives are useful to engage users to produce contents for OR.C.HE.S.T.R.A and address specific behavior. The authors shed light on a partly jagged topic and provide some normative suggestions on how to design a crowdsourcing application.