Using Social Media for Global Security by Ravi Gupta & Hugh Brooks

Author:Ravi Gupta & Hugh Brooks
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Published: 2013-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

Incentives on crowdsourcing platforms also follow the M.I.C.E. model, although we call them extrinsic and intrinsic incentives.

Choosing Extrinsic and Intrinsic Incentives

Your platform may offer extrinsic, intrinsic, or a combination of both incentives. Extrinsic incentives are material items and objects external to a person such as cash, phones, clothes, SMS credits, and toys. They also include services such as the provision of local crop prices and weather forecasts. They are the M in the M.I.C.E. model. The exact nature of the extrinsic incentive will depend heavily on what your target audience likes, prefers, needs, and wants. It is essential to choose incentives that your target audience values. Rewarding free MP3 downloads of the new Iron Maiden album to Tuareg nomads who do not have iPods and have never heard Western heavy metal music will only elicit confusion and disinterest. In contrast, dumb phone ringtones from a local Tuareg rock band such as Tinariwen will resonate with the target audience and leverage technology they already have.

Be creative when coming up with extrinsic incentives. Work with local governments, NGOs, companies, and/or area experts to determine appropriate extrinsic incentives. For example, throughout much of the world where literacy is low and oral traditions persist, new technologies enabling easy recording, replay, and dissemination of local materials may be how you build your platform. Your platform could connect populations (who share a common language that is in danger of dying out) to share security or travel tips across long distances in a remote region. Such a platform could not only provide hard-to-get security tips, but it could map locations, the distribution of the population, and transcribe and create dictionaries (through crowdwork or appropriate language tools). Such an effort would draw not only security-minded organizations, but academics and NGOs (such as UNESCO) as well.4

Generally, extrinsic incentives are easy to quantify, measure, inform the target audience about, and provide. They have agreed-upon definitions. Participants can easily understand what winning an hour's worth of credit at the local cyber cafe entails. They are also likely to entice participants in the beginning when the platform is first launched and they do not yet trust you. However, extrinsic incentives can become expensive and lose their appeal over time. People usually like novelty, so over a long period of time you will have to offer a variety of incentives. Also, people may lie or cheat when exchanging information for money and material objects depending on how they acquire the incentives and the oversight they receive.5 In general, when creating a platform for a long period of time, phase out or minimize the role of extrinsic incentives and replace them with intrinsic incentives.

Intrinsic incentives are internally generated motivations specific to an individual—they are the fuzzy, hard-to-describe things such as pride, a sense of community and belonging, and the feeling of contributing to a valued project and helping out. They are the I, C, and E of the M.I.C.E. model and much more. Usually, intrinsic incentives are agnostic to a person's culture. Everyone responds

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