QMG Presents: Kate Beck: Benefits and Concerns of Crowdsourcing for Research

Crowdsourcing is a method increasingly used in qualitative, quantitative, and mixed-methods research. However, many researchers remain unclear about what this method is, when it may be appropriate to use, and how it could be implemented.

Kate Beck, Program Lead at UC Berkeley's Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC), will facilitate this workshop to help attendees learn more about this method and potentially use it in their own research. In addition to providing a brief overview of the method with examples from the Street Story project for which SafeTREC is currently using crowdsourcing, Kate will help attendees understand potential benefits and discuss common concerns through. This will be an interactive workshop, with the following agenda:

1. general explanation of what crowdsourcing is with review of how it was used by Berkeley SafeTREC,
2. hands-on exercise for planning a project that uses crowdsourcing,
3. hands-on exercise to experience the user's (i.e., persons providing data, members of the "crowd") perspective, and
4. engagement with collected data from the researcher's perspective.