An Exploration of Crowdsourcing Collaboration Processes

Crowdsourcing refers to the use of technologies to gather the collective effort and wisdom from an undefined group of online users for organization innovation and problem solving. While the idea holds a lot of potential, its implementation can be thwarted by an ill design and management of the collaboration processes. Therefore, studies on crowdsourcing collaboration processes are important for the advancement of the field. We argue that the study of collaboration processes in crowdsourcing can benefit by referring to the literature on collaboration patterns. We explored and classified support in 135 crowdsourcing websites for six general collaboration patterns (generate, reduce, clarify, organize, evaluate, build consensus) through coding and cluster analyses. Findings showed that generate and evaluate patterns were dominant, while reduce, clarify, organize and build consensus were either rarely implemented or not fully developed. We also found that collaboration did not necessarily happen among online users but also between the online user group (the crowd), the organization’s internal expert group, and the technology. These findings reveal implications for future research