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On Moderating Software Crowdsourcing Challenges

Crowdsourcing divides a task into small pieces that are carried out by the crowd. In Software Engineering, crowdsourcing divides the software development tasks of to be carried out online by the crow and is simply called Software Crowdsourcing (SW CS). Most SW CS platforms support this emerging software development strategy and operate within a framework of competition among the crowd. Competitive SW CS platforms intentionally minimize communication and collaboration among the parties involved (customer, platform, and crowd) while they compete in the software development tasks. The goal of this paper is to investigate platform moderators in SW CS challenges. Platform moderators are individuals who work for the SW CS platforms to mediate customer and crowd. A qualitative analysis of the content of the communication forums hosted on the TopCoder platform was performed to analyze the messages exchanged by the platform moderators and the crowd. Our empirical results indicate that co-pilots enforce and, at the same time, extend the limitations of the documentation associated with the tasks to support crowd members, provide technical help to crowd members during the competitions, and engage the crowd in the challenges. Co-pilots are organized, work diligently, worrying about being fair, and, at the same time, seeking to find a balance between autonomy and dependency on the customer. We conclude by providing insights to improve the design of software crowdsourcing platforms.