. Author manuscript; available in PMC: 2020 Dec 1.

Published in final edited form as: J Acquir Immune Defic Syndr. 2019 Dec;82(Suppl 3):S271–S278. doi: 10.1097/QAI.0000000000002193

Table 2.

The strengths and weaknesses of crowdsourcing approaches

		Articles
Strengths	Higher potential for innovation due to heterogeneity of knowledge in the crowd compared with a panel of experts	¹
	Encourages collaboration between different groups, fields, and sectors	^1-5
	Empowers key populations	^{1, 3, 6-9}
	Builds community capacity	^{5, 10}
	Integrates grassroots perspectives into high-level strategy and policy process	^{6, 11, 12}
	Minimal cost compared to social marketing for public health intervention development	^{5, 7-9}
	Creates messages/strategies that are locally relevant and feasible to implement	^{5, 7-9}
	Documents events of interests; mitigates the fear of stigma and retaliation through anonymous reporting	^10-12
	Strong scalability and wide coverage of key populations	^{5, 10}
Weaknesses	Over-reliance on internet channels and ignores individuals who lack internet access	^{1, 4, 13}
	Risk of too few submissions if the topics are non-sensitive to populations of interest	¹
	Open contests and hackathons are temporally transient and relatively short term	^{1, 4, 13}
	Open contests have potential risks of excluding community members from steering committee, biased crowd judging	^{1, 4, 13}
	Open contests and hackathons are subject to exploitation and insufficient recognition of contributors, and limited sharing	^{1, 4, 13}
	Incident report systems focuses on collecting survivors’ experiences of sexual abuse/harassment but not directly preventing it from happening	^10-12