Challenges and Lessons from Working with Data Collected by Crowdfunding in the Wild.

The rise of the smartphone opens up new possibilities for researchers to observe users in everyday life situations. Researchers from diverse disciplines use in-field studies to gain new insights into user behavior and experiences. However, the collected datasets are mostly not available to the public and thus results are neither falsifiable nor reproducible. Community datasets attempt to counter this problem, i.a. by sharing the cost of the data collection. One example is the crowdfunded campaign CrowdSignals. In this paper, we report on our experiences in doing research with crowdfunded data, drawing on the example of this dataset. By "zooming into" specific aspects of the data, we juxtapose the expectations we had when co-funding the data collection with our findings when analyzing the dataset. We highlight shortcomings and benefits of crowdfunded datasets, draw lessons and discuss how future crowdsourced data collection campaigns might be improved.