Large-scale Volunteer Engagement in Humanitarian Mapping

Organisers of large crowdsourcing initiatives need to consider how to produce outcomes with their projects, but also how to build volunteer capacity. The initial contributor experience plays an important role in this, particularly when contributions require some expertise: not all contributors who start to learn the practice are likely to be retained. My dissertation is focused on this growth challenge, using the example of the volunteer community of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team. The research involves several quantitative observational studies at the scale of the individual, the group, and the collective, and qualitative studies of contributor experiences.