Analysis of participant behaviour in a twitter based crowdsourcing project

Crowd creation is a branch of crowdsourcing that focus on creation of activities such as asking individuals to film TV commercials, perform language translation or solve challenging scientific problems. Innocentive, iStockphoto, TopCoder, Wikipedia and Linux are the best known examples for crowd creation. Twitter based projects appear to be a promising tool for open innovation processes and especially for crowd creation activities. BurtonStory is a crowd creation project by Tim Burton ran over twitter between November 20th and December 6th of 2010. The author started a new story of cocreated character StainBoy, with a single sentence, and the rest of the story is created by the crowd. The aim of this paper is to analyze the behaviors of the project participants. Date/Time based participation, participation intensity, participant profiles are analyzed. Based on these analysis implications for forthcoming applications are discussed.