Crowd Science Minitrack

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IT-mediated Crowds are increasingly be implemented by organizations for multifarious purposes, using multifarious techniques. In this minitrack we seek to coalesce a specific and enduring community of IS and IS-related researchers focused first and foremost on the study of the organizational use of IT-mediated Crowds as a phenomenon.

Our aim is to harness, and thus focus, the currently very broad inter-disciplinary study of IT-mediated Crowds within the IS discipline proper, and to incite a sharing of results, and a cross-pollination of ideas, among researchers currently looking at IT-mediated Crowd implementations from IS, I-School, HCI, Computer Science, Marketing, Education, and Technology Innovation perspectives.

In the purview of this mini-track, IT-mediated Crowd phenomena include:

  • Crowdsourcing
  • Crowd Finance (Crowdfunding & Blockchains)
  • Prediction Markets
  • Citizen Science
  • Open Innovation & Competition platforms
  • Social Media for resource creation
  • Wikis & Wikipedia
  • Big Data from Crowds
  • Participatory Sensing (Crowdsensing)
  • Spatial Crowdsourcing (the Sharing Economy)
  • Situated/Geo-fenced/IoT Crowdsourcing
  • Wearables Crowdsourcing
  • IT-mediated Collective Intelligence

We encourage new empirical and theoretical submissions from social, economic, technical and organizational scholars, investigating these phenomena in a variety of contexts, including:

  • Health Care
  • Institutional and Strategic perspectives
  • Education
  • Governance & Policy
  • Smart Cities & GIS
  • Entrepreneurship
  • User Innovation & Creative Consumers
  • Institutional and Strategic perspectives
  • International Business & Development perspectives

Particular questions/topics of interest include:

  • Human computation, micro-tasking and virtual labour markets
  • Crowdsourced contests, their design and efficacy
  • Gamification in IT-mediated Crowds
  • IT-mediated Crowds and intellectual property
  • IT-mediated Crowds for invention and commercialization
  • Business models of IT-mediated Crowd startups
  • The economics of IT-mediated Crowds
  • The knowledge dynamics of IT-mediated Crowds
  • IT-mediated Crowds and 3D printing
  • Wearables & Sensors in, and as Crowds
  • IT-mediated Crowds and machine learning
  • The role of Bots/AI in IT-mediated Crowds
  • Measuring IT-mediated Crowds and outcomes
  • Formal models and computational models/simulations
  • IT-mediated Crowd platforms
  • IT-mediated Crowds & Common pool resources
  • Varieties of Crowd Capital
  • IT-mediated Crowds and Industry/competitive dynamics
  • CrowdMember/IT/Organization dynamics
  • CrowdLabor movements and labor dynamics
  • Expert, non-expert, and mixed Crowds

Minitrack Co-Chairs:

Jan Kietzmann (Primary Contact)
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Email: jan_kietzmann@sfu.ca

John Prpić
Lulea University of Technology
Email: john.prpic@ltu.se

Browse

Recent Submissions

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Wikidatians are Born: Paths to Full Participation in a Collaborative Structured Knowledge Base
    (2017-01-04) Piscopo, Alessandro; Phethean, Christopher; Simperl, Elena
    We investigated how participation evolves in Wikidata as its editors become established members of the community. Originally conceived to support Wikipedia, Wikidata is a collaborative structured knowledge base, created and maintained by a large number of volunteers, whose data can be freely reused in other contexts. Just like in any other online social environment, understanding its contributors' pathways to full participation helps Wikidata improve user experience and retention. \ \ We analysed how participation changes in time under the frameworks of legitimate peripheral participation and activity theory. We found out that as they engage more with the project, ``Wikidatians'' acquire a higher sense of responsibility for their work, interact more with the community, take on more advanced tasks, and use a wider range of tools. Previous activity in Wikipedia has varied effects. As Wikidata is a young community, future work should focus on volunteers with little or no experience in similar projects and specify means to improve critical aspects such as engagement and data quality.
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    Which Reward Should I Choose? Preliminary Evidence for the Middle-Option Bias in Reward-Based Crowdfunding
    (2017-01-04) Simons, Alexander; Weinmann, Markus; Tietz, Matthias; vom Brocke, Jan
    Crowdfunding has become an important research area, but we know little about how rewards influence fundraising success. This research-in-progress studies reward-based crowdfunding through a behavioral-economics lens. We draw on dual-process theory and provide preliminary evidence for the middle-option bias in crowdfunding. Two empirical studies in a simple, controlled environment confirm the significance of the middle-option bias, both for varying numbers of donation options and for varying price ranges. Since our findings suggest that the positioning of rewards in a menu of rewards can influence support behavior and how much money project creators collect, they can inform the design of crowdfunding projects. Our future research will develop a mock crowdfunding website to study the middle-option bias in a more realistic environment.
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    The More the Merrier? The Effects of Community Feedback on Idea Quality in Innovation Contests
    (2017-01-04) Seeber, Isabella; Zantedeschi, Daniel; Bhattacherjee, Anol; Füller, Johann
    Innovation contests represent a novel and popular approach for organizations to leverage the creativity of the crowd for organizational innovations. In this approach, ideators present their initial ideas to a global community of potential users, and solicit their feedback for idea improvement or refinement. However, it is not clear which types of feedback lead to the development of better ideas and which contingent factors moderate these relationships. In this study, we examine the role of community feedback on idea development in online innovation contests, by using feedback intervention theory to develop a set of hypotheses relating community feedback and idea quality, and then testing those hypotheses using data from ZEISS VR ONE innovation contest. Our analysis suggest that task information feedback does lead to improvement in idea quality, while task learning and task motivation feedback does not, and the number of users providing feedback moderate the relationship between feedback and idea quality. Implications of our findings for theory and practice are discussed.
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    One for All? Managing External and Internal Crowds through a Single Platform - A Case Study
    (2017-01-04) Mrass, Volkmar; Peters, Christoph; Leimeister, Jan Marco
    Whereas crowdsourcing as a topic has often been addressed in recent literature, web-based crowdworking platforms that manage the interface between crowdsourcers and crowdworkers have not received much attention so far. Furthermore, most of these platforms focus on either the management of external or internal crowds; platforms that handle both groups are rare. This paper investigates such a provider: the German company Across Systems. It uses a hybrid model, offering an individual “mini crowdworking platform” that enables the simultaneous government of external and internal crowds as well as a more traditional marketplace crowdworking platform (crossMarket) where supply and demand meet. Using a single-case study approach, the main contribution of this paper is to shed light on a model that has the potential to change the current crowdworking platform market. We show that managing both external and internal crowds on one platform can increase the acceptance, quality and speed of task completion.
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    An Exploratory Analysis of Title II Crowdfunding Success
    (2017-01-04) Mamonov, Stanislav; Malaga, Ross; Rosenblum, Janet
    The passage of the Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act (JOBS Act) ushered in a new wave of equity crowdfunding in the United States. Title II of the JOBS Act aims to make it easier for new ventures to raise funds from accredited investors. The number of Title II crowdfunded projects is growing rapidly. Based on data for U.S. online 506(c) offerings across 17 leading platforms, more than $1.27 billion in capital was committed to Title II projects through 2015. Our analysis of Title II offerings from these platforms reveals that real estate ventures are the single largest category with more than $316 million in committed capital, yet only ~34% of the crowdfunded real estate offerings receive the full amount of capital sought. Text mining of the real estate project descriptions reveals the critical facilitation role played by the successful crowdfunding platforms in reducing the information asymmetry between the entrepreneurs and investors by performing due diligence on the potential Title II investment opportunities.
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    Introduction to Crowd Science Minitrack
    (2017-01-04) Kietzmann, Jan; Prpić, John