Governing nonprofit platform ecosystems – an information platform for refugees

ABSTRACT

The number of refugees arriving in Europe increased dramatically in 2015. Following arrival at the host country, refugees need access to information on various topics such as applying for asylum, medical care, educational offerings, jobs, or social activities. As many different parties using different channels provide this information, refugees struggle to access relevant information at the right time. Our goal in addressing this information deficit is to support a digital information platform for refugees by developing a governance strategy for the ecosystem of information providers. Within an action research study based on a nonprofit project, we evaluate the implementation of governance mechanisms derived from platform and community governance literature. Our results show that governance mechanisms are implemented differently for nonprofit platform ecosystems than for commercial platform ecosystems. These results enhance the societal impact of the information platform developed in the project. The study contributes to theory on governance of platform ecosystems and IT-enabled collaboration by evaluating established governance mechanisms in the context of nonprofit platforms.

KEYWORDS:

• Consultation and collaboration across digital differences
• eGovernance for good government (eGovernment and eBusiness)
• open sourcing
• online communities
• IT platform
• platform governance

Acknowledgements

We thankfully acknowledge the helpful comments of the participants of the AIS SIG GlobDev Ninth Annual Workshop 2016 in Dublin. Finally, we thank the reviewers of the original manuscript for their insightful comments, which helped to improve the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Maximilian Schreieck is a researcher at the Chair for Information Systems, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. He holds a Master’s degree in Technology and Management from Technische Universität München. His current research experiences and interests include governance of software platforms and societal impact of IS. His research has been published in refereed conference proceedings such as ECIS, AMCIS, and PACIS.

Manuel Wiesche is a postdoctoral researcher at the Chair for Information Systems, Technische Universität München, Munich, Germany. He graduated in Information Systems from Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität, Münster, Germany and holds a doctoral degree in Information Systems from the Technische Universität München. His current research experiences and interests include IT risk management, IT-enabled management control systems, digital platforms, and IT projects. His research has been published in the MIS Quarterly, JMAR, and a number of refereed conference proceedings such as ICIS, ECIS, and HICSS.

Helmut Krcmar is a Full Professor of Information Systems at the Chair of Information Systems, Technische Universität München (TUM), Germany. He worked as a Post Doctoral Fellow at the IBM Los Angeles Scientific Center, as Assistant Professor of Information Systems at the Leonard Stern School of Business, NYU, and at Baruch College, CUNY. From 1987 to 2002, he was Chair for Information Systems, Hohenheim University, Stuttgart. His research interests include information and knowledge management, service management, business process management, and information systems in health care and electronic government. His work has appeared in the Journal of Management Information Systems, Wirtschaftsinformatik, the Information Systems Journal, and the International Journal of Medical Informatics.

ORCID

Maximilian Schreieck http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1937-8869

Manuel Wiesche http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0401-287X

Helmut Krcmar http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2754-8493

Notes

1 www.integreat-app.de.

2 Activity was measured as the number of “save” and “edit” operations performed in the CMS.

3 Tür an Tür Digital Factory gGmbH, http://tuerantuer.de/digitalfabrik/.

Additional information

Funding

We thank the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy for funding this research as part of the project 01MD15001D (ExCELL) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research for funding through the DAAD Welcome program [project no. 57335466].