Nargess Tahmasbi

Conceptual Foundations of Crowdsourcing: A Review of IS Research

Crowd sourcing is a collaboration model enabled by people-centric web technologies to solve individual, organizational, and societal problems using a dynamically formed crowd of people who respond to an open call for participation. We report on a literature survey of crowd sourcing research, focusing on top journals and conferences in the Information Systems (IS) field. To our knowledge, ours is the first effort of this type in the IS discipline. Contributions include providing a synopsis of crowd sourcing research to date, a common definition for crowd sourcing, and a conceptual model for guiding future studies of crowd sourcing. We show how existing IS literature applies to the elements of that conceptual model: Problem, People (Problem Owner, Individual, and Crowd), Governance, Process, Technology, and Outcome. We close with suggestions for future research.

A Definition of Community Crowdsourcing Engagement and Application

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technologies to gather the collective effort and wisdom from an undefined group of online users for organizational innovation and/or problem solving. A critical challenge for crowdsourcing users and providers is to engage online participants to make sustained contributions. This research in progress paper proposes a behavioural perspective on the definition and measurement of participant engagement in community crowdsourcing, a crowdsourcing model where all participants can see and react to everyone else ideas. In our research, we propose to conceive participant engagement as a set of engaging behaviours and evaluate it through the magnitude, temporal intensity, diversity, and recency of these behaviours. We illustrate the construct operationalization by the Participant Engagement Index (PEI) that quantifies engaging behaviours in the context of MindMixer, a community crowdsourcing service provider. We further provide an initial illustration of the PEI’s utility through the analysis of field project data from MindMixer. We expect that our study will provide guidance for future research into existing and new practices to study and improve the active and sustained participation of crowds in open collaboration forums.

Theoretical Fashions in Crowdsourcing: A Snapshot of IS Research

When new information technologies emerge, they stimulate the curiosity of Information System (IS) research and practice. Research and practices regarding emerging technologies can be characterized as IS fashions, which can lead to IS innovations. Yet, researchers and practitioners often wonder if these fashions are the next big thing or just a passing fad. One way to determine the contribution of a scientific fashion is to understand its theoretical state and maturity as reported in the literature. We performed a theoretical assessment of one specific IS fashion: crowdsourcing. The main objective of our research is to understand the characteristics of theories in crowdsourcing research and to determine the origins of these theories. Using Gregor’s (2006) taxonomy, we performed a systematic literature review to identify and categorize the type of theories developed and used in crowdsourcing research. Close to forty percent of the surveyed articles are explanatory in nature, focusing on cause and effects relationships. Most articles use established theories to motivate research questions or hypotheses. Least common is theoretical research to motivate the design of crowdsourcing related artifacts.