Nichesourcing: Harnessing the Power of Crowds of Experts

In this position paper we identify nichesourcing, a specific form of human-based computation that harnesses the computational efforts from niche groups rather than the “faceless crowd”. We claim that nichesourcing combine the strengths of the crowd with those of professionals, optimizing the result of human-based computation for certain tasks. We illustrate our claim using scenarios in two domains: cultural heritage and regreening in Africa. The contribution of this paper is to provide a definition of the main characteristics of nichesourcing as a natural extension of crowdsourcing and to outline research challenges for realizing nichesourcing applications.