A Gamification Framework for Volunteered Geographic Information

Using crowdsourcing methods to gather large amounts of useful geodata presents many challenges. One challenge is to attract volunteers to participate in crowdsourcing activities. Several studies conclude that to encourage crowdsourcing it is necessary to take into account people’s intrinsic motivation (e.g. fun, altruism, ambition). Gamification is a useful approach to promote people’s motivation and engagement. The work we report on in this paper tries to give an answer to the question “How to use concepts provided by gamification in order to motivate individuals to participate in crowdsourcing applications in the geospatial context? How to best combine these two worlds?” We designed a gamification framework for VGI processes and applied the framework to an existing application for evaluation purposes. Such a framework is intended for application developers as a guideline to apply principles from gamification to collect user-generated geospatial data.