Crowd-based open innovation communities have received increasing attention, based on the premise that leveraging the power and diversity of the crowd can lead to innovative outcomes. However, we still know little about how work is coordinated over time in this context, especially as the innovation process moves from idea generation to elaboration. Based on literature and theories of coordination and collaboration in traditional creative contexts and on emergent evidence from research on crowd work, we develop hypotheses about the unique interaction patterns that characterize co-creation and how these patterns impact, over time, submission quality. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a study of a crowd-based open innovation platform. We found that, in general, the diversity of contributors increased over time, but for high quality submissions, the number of contributors decreased and a small group of involved people became more dominant in providing feedback. Further, we observe that the creators of more successful submissions, while not dominating the discussion, were particularly engaged in the discussions in later stages. Our work contributes to understanding the temporal dynamics in open innovation communities by providing evidence that successful interaction patterns vary depending on the phase of the project.
Bursty Coordination in Online Communities
The collective intelligence of online communities often depends on implicit forms of
coordination, given the fluidity of membership and the lack of traditional hierarchies
and associated incentive structures. This coordination drives knowledge production.
Studying temporal dynamics may help elucidate how coordination happens.
Specifically, the rate of interaction with an artifact such as a Wikipedia page can
function as a signal that affects future interactions. Many activities can be
characterized as bursty, meaning activity is not evenly spread or random, but is instead
concentrated. This study analyzes 3,260 Wikipedia articles and shows that the
coordination pattern in the Wikipedia community is mostly bursty. More importantly,
the extent of burstiness affects article quality. This work highlights the important role
temporal dynamics can play in the coordination process in online communities, and
how it can affect the quality of knowledge production.
- Publication Date:
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10171236
- Journal Name:
- ICIS 2019 Proceedings
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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