Crowdsourcing of information systems research

Abstract

This paper addresses how technology-mediated mass collaboration offers a dramatically innovative alternative for producing IS research. We refer to this emerging genre as the crowdsourced research genre and develop a framework to structure discourse on how it may affect the production of IS research. After systematically traversing the alternative genre’s landscape using the framework, we propose a research agenda of the most substantial and imminent issues for the successful development of the genre, including contributor incentives, scholarly contribution assessment, anonymity, governance, intellectual property ownership, and value propositions. In addressing this research agenda, we reflect on what might be learned from other areas in which crowdsourcing has been established with success.

Keywords:

• crowdsourcing
• research agenda
• research framework
• alternative genre
• information systems discipline
• IS research

Special Issue Editors: Michel Avital, Ulrike Schultze, and Lars Mathiassen.

Special Issue Editors: Michel Avital, Ulrike Schultze, and Lars Mathiassen.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

James Love

About the Authors

James Love is an Assistant Professor of Healthcare Informatics at Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady University in Baton Rouge, LA. He is a graduate of the Department of Information Systems and Decision Sciences in the E. J. Ourso College of Business at Louisiana State University. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree in Business Information Systems and a Master of Science degree in Information Systems at Mississippi State University. Prior to entering the Ph.D. program at Louisiana State University, he worked in university IT departments at Mississippi State University and Wake Forest University. His research interests aim to advance the understanding of interactions among people, processes, and technology. His research focuses on management and sourcing of IS, adoption and diffusion of IT, and IS academic research scholarship. He generally situates research studies within the context of groups who serve broader societal goals such as academic research communities, healthcare organizations, open-source/crowdsourcing communities, and other virtual communities.

Rudy Hirschheim

Rudy Hirschheim is the Ourso Family Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Louisiana State University. He has previously been on the faculties of University of Houston (Houston, TX), McMaster University (Hamilton, ON), the London School of Economics (University of London), and Templeton College (University of Oxford). He has been awarded honorary doctorates at the University of Oulu (Oulu, Finland) in May 2006 and the University of Bern (Bern, Switzerland) in December 2012. He was named AIS Fellow by the Association for Information Systems in December 2007 and given the LEO Award for Lifetime Achievement by the AIS in December 2013. He is Senior Editor for the journal Information and Organization and on the editorial boards of the journals: Information Systems Journal; Journal of Strategic Information Systems; Journal of Management Information Systems; Journal of Information Technology; and Strategic Outsourcing. He has previously been on the editorial boards of: European Journal of Information Systems, Journal of the Association for Information Systems, and MIS Quarterly. He was VP for Publications for the Association for Information Systems.