Eliciting and focusing geographic volunteer work

Open content communities such as wikis derive their value from the work done by users. However, a key challenge is to elicit work that is sufficient and focused where needed. We address this challenge in a geographic open content commu-nity, the Cyclopath bicycle route finding system. We devised two techniques to elicit and focus user work, one using fa-miliarity to direct work opportunities and another visually highlighting them. We conducted a field experiment, find-ing that (a) the techniques succeeded in eliciting user work, (b) the distribution of work across users was highly unequal, and (c) user work benefitted the community (reducing the length of the average computed route by 1 kilometer). Author Keywords Wiki, geowiki, open content, geographic volunteer work, volunteered geographic information ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces: Collaborative computing, computer-supported cooperative work, web-based interaction.