Sustainable solvers participation in non-profit mobile crowdsourcing initiatives: A review of successful applications

In a mobile crowdsourcing initiative, solvers are active users who make attempt to solve the given task. Volume of solvers participation is thus important to the success of any mobile crowdsourcing initiatives because chances of a task being solved basically increase with the number of solvers who attempt to solve it. Sustaining solvers participation is therefore an agendum that should be given consideration during the design of a mobile crowdsourcing initiative, particularly in the nonprofit ones where financial rewards are not normally offered to the solvers. Therefore, other forms of rewarding mechanisms, if any, have to be made equally compelling from the solvers point of view, and this begins with identifying the factors that influence sustained solvers participation in non-profit mobile crowdsourcing initiatives. To identify these factors, a systematic literature review was performed, which focused on factors affecting returning or subsequent solvers participation. A total of seven factors were identified, which were validated using a selection of successful non-profit mobile crowdsourcing applications. Result obtained showed that mobile crowdsourcing application that implemented all of the factors received the highest rating from the users, indicating the potential of using these factors as basis in developing non-profit mobile crowdsourcing applications that can sustain solvers participation.