Social implications of crowdsourcing in rural Scotland

Various surveys mentioned that the commercial benefits of Internet crowdsourcing are reaped largely by people located in metro areas and smaller cities. The impact of crowdsourcing on the rural population is questionable. The aim of this research is to bridge widening urban and rural divide by providing knowledge-intensive crowdsourcing tasks to rural work force which could provide long term benefits to them as well as improve supporting infrastructure. This paper reports an initial study of the demographic of small samples of twenty two rural homeworkers in Scotland, their motivation to do crowdsourcing work, present main occupation, computer skills, views on rural infrastructure and finally their level of skill in solving three spatial visualization tests. The survey shows that flexible hours of working, extra income, and work life balance are the three important factors emphasized as motivational constructs to do crowdsourcing work. Their skills on solving a spatial visualization test is equivalent to the literature reported results, and also high correlations are identified between these tests. These results suggest that with minimum training the homeworkers could able to solve knowledge-intensive industrial spatial reasoning problems to increase their earning potentials.