Can Mobile Workforce Revolutionize Country-Scale Crowdsourcing?

Traditional urban-scale crowdsourcing approaches suffer from three caveats - lack of complete spatiotemporal coverage, lack of accurate information and lack of sustained engagement of crowd workers. We argue that mobile workforces roaming around the city (and the larger country) can overcome all three caveats if their daily activity routines embed crowdsourcing tasks. To this end, in this paper, we report a first-of-its-kind study in which we explore behavioral attributes of mobile postal workers both quantitatively (6.3K) and qualitatively (6) to assess the opportunities of leveraging them for country-scale crowdsourcing tasks. Based on our observations, we develop a crowdsourcing infrastructure with carefully designed data collection strategies, and a corresponding wearable data collection application. We briefly present this solution and discuss its potential in country-scale crowdsourcing applications.