Designing a gamification mechanism to encourage contributions in a crowdsourcing system

Crowdsourcing initiatives have been around for several years, and have been experiencing increasing adoption. Crowdsourced systems use the aggregation of efforts from multiple individuals to perform tasks or solve problems. The exponential growth of mobile computing has strengthened this approach, and several applications have appeared which enable individuals to provide information that can later be aggregated and reused. However, these applications are highly dependent on user contributions, and this can become a problem if not enough contributions are provided. Gamification strategies may help increase user contributions, through the creation of game-like interactions. This paper explores the design of gamification strategies to engage users to in real time data mapping.