The Contours of Crowd Capability
This work addresses the problem of selecting and understanding crowd-engaging tools for organizations, but it is incremental as it builds on existing theory without introducing new methods or data.
The paper compares and contrasts information systems tools for crowd engagement using Crowd Capital theory, providing practitioners with a decision-making resource and researchers with insights into key properties of these systems and crowd qualities.
In this work we use the theory of Crowd Capital as a lens to compare and contrast a number of IS tools currently in use by organizations for crowd-engagement purposes. In doing so, we contribute to both the practitioner and research domains. For the practitioner community we provide decision-makers with a convenient and useful resource, in table-form, outlining in detail some of the differing potentialities of crowd-engaging IS. For the research community we begin to unpack some of the key properties of crowd-engaging IS, including some of the differing qualities of the crowds that these IS application engage.