Abstract

Open data are often contributed by various governments and public sector actors. An increasingly popular way to collect large bespoke data sets is crowdsourcing. In this article, we explore crowdsourced open data as enablers of future software solutions. We recruited participants from an online paid crowdsourcing platform to provide open mental health related data that was used to create an interactive data-driven decision support system for self-care. We then invited a sub-sample of 80 participants back to explore the tool that was created using their own data and to provide a rich account of perceptions on issues around such health data reuse in software. Our results unfold a range of different perceived threats and opportunities in using crowdsourced data to enable software solutions, and our work contributes a topical case study and discussion toward the use of crowdsourced data in an open fashion.