Decentralised approach for a reusable crowdsourcing platform utilising standard web servers

Crowdsourcing has gained increasing interest during the last years as means for solving complex tasks with the help of a flexible group of contributors. The crowd can contribute with collecting data in the field, completing map information or votes for ideas or products. Even though the participation of large numbers of users with heterogeneous devices in crowdsourcing is a highly recurrent task, generic infrastructures for crowdsourcing can be hardly found. Especially the management of users, mobile devices and contributed data has to be repetitively implemented in new projects. To ease the development of crowdsourcing applications, in this paper we propose a generic platform for crowdsourcing supporting diverse crowdsourcing scenarios, the ability to handle large numbers of users and the involvement of heterogeneous mobile devices. The evaluation is based on scalability and performance experiments in order to demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.