Community interactions at crowd scale: hybrid crowds on the GitHub platform

Abstract

Communities and crowds have both been popular settings for the study of open innovation, but until recently, scholars have tended to study each in relative isolation from the other. The separate study of communities and crowds may mask commonalities and areas of overlap. In this exploratory study, we examine hybrid crowds, which exhibit norms of reciprocity common in communities, as well as patterns of contribution dispersion common in crowds. We show empirical variation along these two dimensions using data from six machine learning projects hosted on the GitHub software platform. We discuss the implications of hybrid crowds for sponsoring firms and opportunities for further research by scholars of open innovation.

Collaboration of Firms With New Forms of Organizing: Extending the Relational View

“…Besides the literature dealing with such unifying basic NFO features—the commonalities between the various forms of NFOs (Powell, 2017; Seidel et al, 2017; Sims & Woodard, 2020; West & Sims, 2018)—another stream of research addresses the idiosyncratic characteristics and subtle differences between special forms of NFOs, such as different kinds of crowds (Felin et al, 2017; Kolbjørnsrud, 2017; Nickerson et al, 2017) and communities (Dahlander & Frederiksen, 2012; Faraj, von Krogh, Monteiro, & Lakhani, 2016; Kane & Ransbotham, 2016). Despite these distinctions, however, “there is often considerable overlap between these forms—and often the boundaries are fuzzy” (West & Sims, 2018, p. 61), and “crowd and community attributes can coexist” (Sims & Woodard, 2020, p. 122). We agree with both of the latter statements and hold that these NFO forms are similar enough to be subsumed under a term that encompasses crowds and different kinds of entities, such as online communities, innovation communities, user communities, crowdsourcing activities, and community sourcing (Boudreau & Lakhani, 2013; Dahlander & Frederiksen, 2012; Felin et al, 2017; Harhoff & Lakhani, 2016; Seidel et al, 2017).…”

“…Whereas the key characteristics of traditional organizations, such as their constitution as organizations, their formal structures, their clear boundaries, and their set of organizational goals, suggest a high degree of organizing (Tsoukas, Patriotta, Sutcliffe, & Maitlis, 2020; Weick, 1969), this implication does not hold in the same manner for NFOs. Although we acknowledge that the field of NFOs encompasses a variety of NFOs with different degrees of reciprocal interaction inside the respective NFO (Sims & Woodard, 2020) and, hence, different degrees of self-organizing (Afuah, 2018; Afuah & Tucci, 2012; Dahlander & Frederiksen, 2012; Dobusch & Schoeneborn, 2015; Majchrzak, Malhotra, & Zaggl, 2021; Sims & Woodard, 2020), the general difference between NFOs and traditional firms in terms of degree of self-organizing remains significant.…”

“…Users inside the Lego community, for example, can realize their own ideas and input with the help of the Lego engineers and production capabilities (Antorini et al, 2012). For software coding, GitHub users receive the opportunity to gain access to early-stage products from software companies (e.g., Microsoft) and the latest developer frameworks (e.g., Alphabet’s Google Android) (Sims & Woodard, 2020). These dynamics are in line with the early observation by von Hippel and von Krogh (2003) that open-source software developments are often characterized by a mixture of private and collective models of innovation.…”

“…Such interorganizational collaboration can be understood as cooperative arrangements between two or more organizations to share and access resources and ultimately to improve performance (Oliveira & Lumineau, 2019; Parmigiani & Rivera-Santos, 2011). To stay innovative and competitive, firms increasingly face the need to strive for new strategic openness and to operate outside their well-known boundaries (Appleyard & Chesbrough, 2017; Berends & Sydow, 2019; Chesbrough, Lettl, & Ritter, 2018; Sims & Woodard, 2020). One way of translating this need into action is to incorporate “new forms of organizing” (NFOs), such as crowds or communities, into their relationship portfolio (Amit & Han, 2017; Boudreau & Lakhani, 2013; Dobusch & Kapeller, 2018; Fisher, 2019; Sims & Woodard, 2020; West & Bogers, 2017; Zobel & Hagedoorn, 2020).…”

Mechanisms to Engage an Online Community in Crowdsourcing: Insights from an Idea Contest in Training

“…Consequently, a stream of research has concentrated on understanding the different dynamics that can lead from groups to online communities, or to open rather than closed crowds in crowdsourcing challenges and idea competitions, that is, contests (Seidel, Langner and Sims, 2016;Cross et al, 2017;Viscusi and Tucci, 2018;West and Sims, 2018;Sims and Woodard, 2019). Moreover, the study of these dynamics in crowd-based problem solving has focused attention on the factors having an impact on team performance in crowdsourcing.…”