Collaborative crowdsourcing has evolved over recent years as a problem-solving model that builds on interactions that take place within crowds or self-organizing teams that form and dissolve in response to an open call. Unlike microtasking, its effectiveness depends primarily on collective actions rather than individual efforts, particularly for non-decomposable tasks that require a certain level of interdependency. Although social news curation has gained attention as a means of empowering both citizens and journalists, there is a need to understand the components and constraints that shape this online crowdsourcing activity when mediated by artificial intelligence (AI). In response to this gap, this paper reimagines the traditional social news curation model through a design fiction prototype consisting of a personalized AI system and user-driven social curation activities. In a highly polarized opinion and political climate where propaganda, misinformation, and extreme polarization take on a dominant framing to generate social chaos, the envisioned solution seeks to model healthy and trustworthy socio-algorithmic interactions towards a more democratic and relevant form of news curation.

This paper explores the challenges and strategies used to design, build and evaluate a collective intelligence (CI) model to support discussions about cities. Through an autoethnography of ideas and discussion practices in both online and offline contexts, this work explores the tensions between the chosen methodological approaches, including design science research (DSR) and participatory action research (PAR). Moreover, we also examine the challenges and pitfalls observed during the practical conduction of this research when involving participants in the process of empirically evaluating the proposed model. Finally, aspects related to the autoethnographic process itself as a reflective method are discussed alongside the consequences of desiring and seeking participation in the research process.

When crowd workers provide their contributions in a shared working environment, they may be influenced by the inputs of other contributors in implicit ways. Stigmergy in crowdsourcing consists of tracking changes in work activities to guide crowd workers based on the digital traces left by other workers. In such scenarios, there is no direct communication between the contributors. Still, the traceable changes they left during their actions act as a mediating element that clearly affects the final work product. From a behavior analysis perspective, the properties recorded in event logs can be of practical value in observing the behavioral traces produced by crowd workers when performing microtasks. This form of task fingerprinting has been explored for over a decade to better understand performance-related data and user navigational behavior in crowdsourcing markets. In line with this, the goal of this paper is to study the feasibility of task fingerprinting alongside the stigmergic effect occurring in a crowdsourcing setting through a user event logger. To this end, a case study was conducted using a real-world scenario of extreme weather phenomena represented on interactive maps. Each user could observe the traces of other crowd members while providing annotations. Twelve experts in weather forecasting were recruited to participate in this study to annotate extreme weather events. The results indicate that it is possible to use task fingerprinting for tracking the stigmergic effect in such activities with gains in terms of implicit coordination. Furthermore, the task fingerprinting allowed to map participants with similar behavioral traces, suggesting an increase in the accuracy of annotation clusters.

In recent years, digital technologies have been used to support discussions about the city and also to involve citizens in participatory public processes. However, despite the widespread use of social media platforms, old issues related to engagement and participation still persist in digital initiatives. The main goal of this study is to carry out an empirical evaluation of a collective intelligence model that combines crowdsourcing and social storytelling to support discussions about the city from a bottom-up perspective. Within a design science research approach we designed a participatory action study that was carried out through a workshop with students and professionals from different areas, such as architecture, urban design and information technology. As a result, we were able to assess whether the collective intelligence model was acceptable to the participants by investigating whether the behavioral assumptions were valid and thus outlining some contributions to the field of urban informatics.

With the increasing development of human-AI teaming structures within and across geographies, the time is ripe for a continuous and objective look at the predictors, barriers, and facilitators of human-AI scientific collaboration from a multidisciplinary point of view. This paper aims at contributing to this end by exploiting a set of factors affecting attitudes towards the adoption of human-AI interaction into scientific work settings. In particular, we are interested in identifying the determinants of trust and acceptability when considering the combination of hybrid human-AI approaches for improving research practices. This includes the way as researchers assume human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourcing as valid mechanisms for aiding their tasks. Through the lens of a unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) combined with an extended technology acceptance model (TAM), we pursue insights on the perceived usefulness, potential blockers, and adoption drivers that may be representative of the intention to use hybrid intelligence systems as a way of unveiling unknown patterns from large amounts of data and thus enabling novel scientific discoveries.

Over the past decades, the use of digital technologies to support participatory urban planning and design has been repeatedly described as a crucial instrument and critical building block for tackling historical problems of participation in such processes. Social media, e-participation platforms, and crowdsourcing applications are examples of technologies that can involve citizens in decision-making processes and thus leverage the benefits of collective intelligence. However, despite the extensive use of social media platforms, old problems related to engagement and participation still occur in digital initiatives. Successful collaboration examples between citizens, policymakers, and strategic stakeholders are still scarce based on online social practices. This study aims to introduce a collective intelligence model, which combines crowdsourcing and social storytelling to support participatory urban planning and design from a bottom-up perspective. The paper concludes by discussing a scenario where citizens can engage in mapping, taking photos, sending ideas, or even creating collective stories about their university issues in a post-pandemic future.

Over the past decade, online crowdsourcing has established itself as an emerging paradigm that industry and government have been using to harness the cognitive abilities of a multitude of users distributed around the world. In this context, microtask crowdsourcing has become the method of choice for addressing a wide range of diverse problems. Microtasks typically require a minimum of time and cognitive effort, but combined individual efforts have made it possible to accomplish great achievements. The goal of this paper is to contribute to the ongoing effort of understanding whether the same success that microtask crowdsourcing has achieved in other domains can be obtained in the field of social news curation. In particular, we ask whether it is possible to turn online news curation, typically a social and collaborative activity on the Web, into a model in which curatorial activities are mapped into microtasks to be performed by a crowd of online users.

Recently, crowdsourcing platforms have been used to solve problems in the field of urban planning by involving crowds of citizens in performing tasks. However, the success of this approach is directly related to how work is managed. The goal of the present study is to make a broad characterization of work management in crowdsourcing approaches applied to urban planning through a systematic literature review. More specifically, we aim to investigate aspects related to the quality of work.