A Cross-Cultural Study of Motivations to Participate in a Crowdsourcing Project to Support People with Disabilities

Crowdsourcing has now been used in many areas, including to support people with disabilities. We explored the perceptions of students from two countries with very different cultures (Libya and the UK) of what would motivate them to participate in a crowdsourcing project (DescribeIT) to support their blind and partially sighted peers by describing images in digital learning resources. Students reported that they were interested to participate and particularly motivated by their sense of altruism and wanting to help others. The results also showed that British students reported a mix of intrinsic and extrinsic motivations, whereas for Libyan participants intrinsic motivations dominated over extrinsic. The results of this study will help us design the DescribeIT system to motivate students most effectively and should make developers of international crowdsourcing projects aware that motivations may differ between participants from different cultures.