A Social Crowdsourcing Community Case Study: Interaction Patterns, Evolution, and Factors That Affect Them

A social crowdsourcing community (SCC) is a moderated online community where members participate in activities designed to elicit their opinions concerning topics related to products or services. This emerging paradigm of human computation systems is distinct in which it combines the powers of crowdsourcing and social networking to allow for systematic querying of crowds and synthesizing response data (i.e., contributions) into coherent reports for decision-makers. Since the SCC paradigm is relatively new, we apply methods from social network analysis and related fields to help answer important questions relevant to SCCs. We demonstrate the applicability of these methods by analyzing five years of interactions in a private SCC starting from its inception. This analysis reveals the patterns in members' interactions within the SCC and key factors that affect them. In addition, the analysis reveals the patterns in the evolution of these interactions.