Towards a goal-oriented taxonomy for crowdsourcing initiatives

In order to integrate previous research efforts and devise a methodology to guide practitioners in crowdsourcing (CS) initiatives, our research aims at answering the following: based on specific goals and tasks, how should an initiator organization set up a specific crowdsourcing initiative? This paper recounts our efforts at identifying types of CS initiatives in terms of goal, task and crowd; and to link these types to existing types of CS processes in the literature. After developing a taxonomy of CS initiatives, we identified types thanks to cluster analysis of 130 CS initiatives meeting a strict definition of CS. We linked the resulting types to the CS processes types coming from an existing taxonomy. By doing this, we also provide further validation of the adopted CS processes taxonomy.