Investigation of Governance Mechanisms for Crowdsourcing Initiatives

Crowdsourcing has increasingly become a recognized sourcing mechanism for problem-solving in organizations by outsourcing the problem to an undefined entity or the ‘crowd’. While the phenomenon of crowdsourcing is not new, it has gained considerable attention in practice due to new crowdsourcing opportunities that have been enabled by new social networking and web 2.0 technologies. While crowdsourcing initiatives provide several benefits for the participants involved, it also poses several novel challenges to effectively manage the crowd. Drawing from the governance mechanisms in the open source literature, we develop an analysis framework to examine the governance mechanisms implemented in three different crowdsourcing initiatives and their impact on the outcome of the initiative.