Crowdsourcing for on-street smart parking

Abstract

Crowdsourcing has inspired a variety of novel mobile applications. However, identifying common practices across different applications is still challenging. In this paper, we use smart parking as a case study to investigate features of crowdsourcing that may apply to other mobile applications. Based on this we derive principles for efficiently harnessing crowdsourcing. We draw three key guidelines: First, we suggest that that the organizer can play an important role in coordinating participants', a key factor to successful crowdsourcing experience. Second, we suggest that the expected participation rate is a key factor when designing the crowdsourcing system: a system with a lower expected participation rate will place a higher burden in individual participants (e.g., through more complex interfaces that aim to improve the accuracy of the collected data). Finally, we suggest that not only above certain threshold of contributors, a crowdsourcing-based system is resilient to freeriding but, surprisingly, that including freeriders (i.e., actors that do not participate in system effort but share its benefits in terms of coordination) benefits the entire system.