Sukrit Venkatagiri - Understanding and Transforming High-Stakes Investigations with Expert-Led Crowdsourcing

Professional investigators in journalism and law enforcement can bring about positive real-world impact such as uncovering disinformation campaigns and catching criminals. However, investigators face daunting analytical and technical challenges, as well as time and resource constraints. In contrast, crowds of novices can be highly scalable and parallelizable, but lack expertise and may engage in vigilante behavior.

To address these challenges, I introduce the expert-led crowdsourcing (ELC) framework to support more effective and ethical investigations. ELC combines professionals’ domain knowledge and guidance with the speed and scale of crowds to produce greater results than either could alone. Through an ethnographic study of two law enforcement investigations, I uncover tensions in a real-world, expert-led crowdsourced investigation. I then instantiate ELC in two social computing systems: GroundTruth and CuriOSINTy. GroundTruth is focused on one specific investigative task, image geolocation. CuriOSINTy expands the flexibility and scope of expert-led crowdsourcing to handle more complex and multiple investigative tasks: identifying and debunking mis- and disinformation. Finally, I discuss extending the expert-led crowdsourcing framework to support professionals in other domains such as medicine and law, as well as efforts to empower crowd workers.