Considerations for the Development and Implementation of Crowdsourcing to Support International Nuclear Safeguards Verification Activities

Active crowdsourcing - the elicitation from online crowd workers - has been successfully implemented for data collection and analysis tasks across many domains, and across sectors including academia, government, and non-governmental organizations. Several non-governmental organizations have developed nuclear non-proliferation relevant crowdsourcing activities or platforms, and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has issued multiple “challenges” for safeguards technology development harnessing the distributed wisdom of crowds. While crowdsourcing may hold promise for multiple types of tasks that could support international nuclear safeguards verification, the construct and implementation of crowdsourcing tasks for safeguards must be carefully considered. As the culmination of over two years of research, we present a series of considerations for safeguards-focused data collection and analysis crowdsourcing tasks. Our paper considers ethical issues related to crowdsourcing in general and safeguards specifically, and practices we observed from a broad literature review to ensure the highest quality of data collection possible, including response assessments, user selection techniques, and task construction recommendations. We intend this paper to provoke thoughtful and careful considerations of task selection, deployment, and response assessment for safeguards-related crowdsourcing activities.