Conceptual Foundations of Crowdsourcing: A Review of IS Research

Crowdsourcing 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 crowdsourcing 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 crowdsourcing research to date, a common definition for crowdsourcing, and a conceptual model for guiding future studies of crowdsourcing. 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.