Curating the Crowd: Towards a Typology of Value-Creating Online Community Interactions

This paper proposes a conceptual model of online community management and development in the context of organisational value creation. It investigates the drivers and limiting factors that contribute to the development of online communities and the appropriation of value from them. A multiple-methods approach to the study of online communities has been used. Qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with subjects actively participating in crowdsourcing activities was obtained over a two-year period. Quantitative methodology included a review of online communities associated with the 2015 Fortune 500 companies, and an additional 167 measurements of eight online communities provided cross-sectional and time-series data. This paper contributes an empirical model that considers two categories of factors: organisational factors - which are controllable by decision-makers within the organisation; and community factors - which shape and limit the nature of the resultant community, and reflect variables relating to the nature of participation.