New Frontiers for Crowdsourcing: The Extended Mind

We introduce the concept of extended mind crowd sourcing (EMC) which capitalises on the way in which humans naturally extend their cognition into the environment, using external objects such as smartphones and applications to augment their mental capacity. This phenomenon means that human computation is embedded in data and devices, representing a new way through which human cognition can be accessed for collective discoveries. We relate EMC to existing sociological and psychological concepts and argue that it lies at the intersection of human computation, social computing and crowd sourcing. EMC is a way in which new problems and discoveries can be tackled, for example as necessitated by "wicked" problems, ethnography and culture. We relate EMC to diverse disciplines and point to ways in which the concept may develop in future. We exemplify EMC by presenting a case study where participation in location-based social networks is used to discover the correlation between mobility and human personality traits. This has involved participation from 43 countries and resulted in analysis of over half a million check-ins at street-level locations.