Context Weaver: Awareness and feedback in networked mobile crowdsourcing tools

Mobile crowdsourcing allows people to collect data using a large pool of participants. In this paper, we focus on mobile crowdsourcing for citizens to solve local issues in context. We argue that such crowdsourcing environments need to support exploration, a continuous, opportunistic, and multi-perspective process that existing crowd sensing systems cannot easily support. We have developed a system called Context Weaver, which connects participants using networked mobile devices in order to support collaborative exploration, and conducted field trials to understand the effect of networking participants in the crowdsourced data-collection activities that encompass planning, execution, and analysis phases. We discuss a methodology for exploratory mobile crowdsourcing by citizens based on the provision of mutual awareness and rapid feedback in context. The proposed methodology can provide a basis for a model of networked mobile crowdsourcing which can exploit not only the man-power but also the creativity of citizens to gather relevant data.