Welcome to Motivational principles and personalization needs for geo-
crowdsourced Intangible Cultural Heritage mobile applications. The paper was written for
the PATCH workshop of the 12th of July 2020 by Federica Lucia Vinella, Ioanna Lykourentzou and
Konstantinos Papangelis. Whether it's for altruistic reasons,
personal gains or third parties interests, users are influenced by
different kinds of motivations when making use of mobile Geo-crowdsourcing
applications (geoCAs). A functional geoCA, particularly if designed for
volunteered geographic information (VGI), is the one that persuades and engages its
users by accounting for their diversity of needs across a period of time. By
providing an overview of personalization research and digital behavior
intervention for geo-crowdsourced ICH, the paper examines the most relevant
of technology-based principles. In addition we present the case of StoryBee,
usability and trigger factors for different crowd users, supported by a range
a mobile geoCA designs for crafting stories by collecting and
sharing users generated content based on their location and favorite places.
Recently, an increased interest has risen for the use of crowdsourcing to gather
geographical ICH data with the help of participation of citizens who can upload,
share and recommend content. Engaging users, both in producing and in
information systems (PGIS), have been good at. Such an application can create a
benefiting of the content is something that participatory geographical
safe zone from where the act of understanding cultural diversity on one
hand and the growth of personal sensitivity towards the heterogeneity of
ICH, on the other, can together develop into practices that are widely taken up
and encouraged. Budhathoki and Haythornthwaite [2013] have conducted a survey to try understanding which
motivational factors were relevant to OpenStreetMap
(OSM) volunteers. For their survey, they divided OSM volunteers into two groups:
serious mappers and casual mappers, based on how much and how often they
contributed, as well as how long they had been contributing. In specific, mappers were subgrouped into six types:
Map lovers and experts also known as 'groupies', Casual mappers, Media
mappers, Passive mappers, Open mappers and Paid mappers. Map lovers are motivated by
simplification, valuable, and trustable information. Casual mappers prefer moderated forums and
community platforms. Media mappers are driven by competitions, mapping parties
and special rewards. Passive mappers value the passive and automated collection
of information. Open mappers are motivated by the enhancement and
simplification of the open-source mapping tools.
Paid mappers look in specific for financial rewards. Listing the five
big guidelines for designing open contribution systems: a) make the act
of contribution easy, without technical, logistic, legal or intellectual barriers.
b) make participation side-effects, known as the principle of passive mapping.
c) prioritize on editing. Discourage the creation of disjointed content - by
providing templates to ease the job to be done. d) reward the users but don't over
reward active participants, otherwise that may
end up dominating the whole project. e) promote quality contributors, for
example, by reputation ranking. Multiple strategies that are known to adaptive systems
would be applicable also to crowdsourced ICH mobile applications. Strategies such
as: competition, comparison, cooperation, customization, rewards, self-monitoring
feedback, suggestions, simulation, praise and personalization, are known to yield
positive results. Based on the literature we developed a recommendation for our ICH
through crowdsourcing. StoryBee is an Android application developed in the
app StoryBee, which captures ICH in cities
context of Utrecht University Research IT innovation program through a project
named 'Collaborative Crowdsourcing Tools for sustaining Intangible Urban Heritage'.
Great emphasis has been put on the user experience as interaction created
together with others. StoryBee was designed as a tool for the enjoyment of
the co-experience. The tool allows people to communicate emotions with each other
by mobile multimedia technology. It offers a list of stories crafted by its
contributors and filtered by its moderators, enriched with images and
meta data provided by the users themselves. The user is allowed to browse
other user stories, search for the ones in the vicinity, geo-locating them with
GPS technology, and even keep a log of published and published stories. The
interest from which they originated and are presented in the form of cards. For
collectively crafted stories are then tightly linked with the places of
each card, for example Freiburg, or Plaza de Espana, the interface offers an
intuitive overview of the amount of stories written in that area by all
contributors, the last time the user visited the place of interest plus
an iconic image of the area for easy identification. The framework's ability to
engage and motivate the crowd is primarily, but not only, based on the
gamification experience of visiting cultural sites, enhanced by the option to
collect different types of trophies. Additionally, other features of the story
and to download them in offline mode, the option to read other people's stories by
the application include: the option to select stories from a particular area
choosing the keywords or tags, the option to edit, permanently delete and
un-publish the authored story before it is assessed by the moderators. The option
to unlock stories based on geographic proximity, and much more.
The StoryBee features have been chosen based on three main groups of crowdsourcers:
Casual StoryBee users, Cultural StoryBee expert,
StoryBee Administrators. Casual StoryBee users are generally visitors and
inhabitants who want to discover the stories behind locations, both popular
and hidden. Cultural StoryBee expert are those cultural experts who want as many
people as possible to discover the area and collect intangible cultural heritage.
StoryBee Administrators are those administrators who want to moderate and
maintain users' content. To wrap up, the decision to opt for a digital medium
outreach to a number of users whilst increasing transparency. Templates, smart
when preserving ICH can significantly help the expansion of participation and
walks, making it a side effect, as well as familiarity and proximity, all reduce the
amount of time, thoughts and effort the user has to make in order to add content
or use the app. Using gamification has also been proven beneficial. In this
paper we present an overview of the technologies, crowdsourcing tools and
systems to safeguard ICH and make more accurate recommendations that can be used
in the production of mobile ICH applications.
visualized in the mock-ups of StoryBee, can provide development teams with good
Those recommendations,
features would be implemented and how some of its features could be integrated into the system.
ideas of what a cultural geo-located application could look like, how its
Going Mobile would promote the continuous evolution and expansion of ICH,
provided that regulators maintain a distinct role and take on a greater
Heritage. Thank you you!
responsibility in preserving this particular facets of our Cultural