Crowdsourcing of information systems research

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.