Taking on Grand Challenges Through Collaborative Crowdsourcing: The Importance of Common Ground for Knowledge Integration
通过对一个应对新冠疫情的在线众包平台进行网络志分析，识别出知识整合的14项活动和6个子过程，强调建立共同基础对协作式众包解决重大挑战的关键作用。
Tackling grand challenges calls for collaborative innovation approaches that can gather various stakeholders around a common goal. One such approach receiving growing scholarly attention is collaborative crowdsourcing. By enabling crowds to collaboratively share and integrate their knowledge, perspectives, and partial solutions, collaborative crowdsourcing changes the role of ordinary people from passive receivers to active creators of innovative solutions for addressing grand challenges. However, our understanding of the knowledge sharing and integrating processes in temporary online crowds is limited and calls for further research. Through a netnographic analysis of an online crowdsourcing platform tackling problems around the Covid-19 pandemic, we provide a detailed account of the knowledge integration processes as they unfold on the platform over time. We identify fourteen activities that individuals engage in and relate these activities to six subprocesses that constitute the knowledge integration process on a collaborative crowdsourcing platform for addressing grand challenges. Our insights contribute to the research on collaborative crowdsourcing by showing the importance of crowds establishing common ground, not only around solutions but also around the different aspects of the problem. Furthermore, when addressing grand challenges, connecting contributions emerges as an important intermediate step between the diverging and converging cycles previously identified in crowdsourcing studies. Finally, our article highlights the importance of (collaborative) crowdsourcing initiatives in making participants feel part of something greater by “building a collective.”