Online community and network - Term Paper Example

Online community and network What are the key advantages and challenges of crowdsourcing? The key advantage to crowdsourcing according to (Lease and Alonso 308) is the fact that it is used as a subsidiary to automation of data and information. Data which involve dealing with emotions of people and addressing their motivation cannot be handled by the computers but rather require the touch of human beings. The other advantage of crowdsourcing is provision of human aspect which leads to social interaction and creation of social interface which lacks in automated machines.

This leads to creation of quality assurance in any task designed (Kollock 152). One of the greatest challenges of crowdsourcing is the high risk of fraud. In crowdsourcing, many people are exposed to sensitive information and since not all of them are manageable, some engage in fraud. The fraudsters ask for personal information such as zip code and they use it to fraud or even scam the person online (Lease 44). The other challenge with crowdsourcing as explained by Lease (51) is abstraction. The people in the crowdsourcing fail to provide specific information but rather engage in generalizations and giving of abstracts.

This leaves behind a lot of unknown information and it violates the ethics as well. When do computers fail to do a good job vs. humans? Computers are built with very high speed for processing data which cannot be compared with that of human beings. However, when it comes to processing of some types of data, human beings are better off as they can be able to handle large amounts of complicated data (Lease and Alonso 312). Computers are machines and cannot understand emotions hence are unable to effectively handle situations involving emotions or even motivation.

These are left for the humans to handle. The data output depends on the input and therefore it comes to verification of assurance of quality of any data, humans are in a better position to handle what the computer has produced (Lease and Alonso 310). What are the hard parts of parceling out such tasks to humans? According to Lease (16), crowds tend to be very noisy which hinders the wisdom of the crowds to make decisions or perform very important tasks as well as handling of overly sensitive information.

The other issue with humans is the distraction brought about by social interaction and social organizations they carry out online. These are distractions which only act to pale facilitation of technological output and application. The social interaction may also lead to more damage than good such as was the case with facilitation of the Arab Springs using social media sites (Lotan, et al 1377). If the work is fully handled by computers, then such occurrences would not be present. What kind of training and technology is needed to split large tasks for many humans to complete and then assemble the results back?

Lotan, et al (1381) on his research on twitter explained the method of shingling which was used to on the large amounts of tweets and which led to fingerprint summary of the tweets which were then used in the research. The large amounts of data are summarized into different segments known as bins. The sorting out of bins can be handed over to different humans to tackle and find out the relevant information being sort. The best of the information can be collected while the rest in the bins is assembled and returned to the system still using the same shingling method.

Humans should be trained on how to engage in the shingling process effectively. Work CitedKollock, Peter. “Design principles for online communities: lessons from early settlements.” Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium, 1997, 152. Lease, Matthew and Omar Alonso. “Crowdsourcing and Human Computation, Introduction.” Springer Encyclopedia Manuscript, September 2014: 304-315.Lease, Matthew. “Adventures in Crowdsourcing: Research at UT Austin & Beyond.” University of Texas, August 20th, 2012, 1-54.

Retrieved from http://www.slideshare.net/mattlease/recent-adventures-in-crowdsourcing-and-human- computationLotan, Gilad et al. The Revolutions Were Tweeted: Information Flows During the 2011Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. International Journal of Communication, 5 (2011): 1375-1405. Print.