Crowdsourcing Controls: A Review and Research Agenda for Crowdsourcing Controls Used for Macro-tasks

Crowdsourcing—the employment of ad hoc online labor to perform various tasks—has become a popular outsourcing vehicle. Our current approach to crowdsourcing—focusing on micro-tasks—fails to leverage the potential of crowds to tackle more complex problems. To leverage crowds to tackle more complex macro tasks requires a better comprehension of crowdsourcing controls. Crowdsourcing controls are mechanisms used to align crowd workers’ actions with predefined standards to achieve a set of goals and objectives. Unfortunately, we know very little about the topic of crowdsourcing controls directed at accomplishing complex macro tasks. To address issues associated with crowdsourcing controls formacro-tasks, this chapter has several objectives. First, it presents and discusses the literature on control theory. Second, this chapter presents a scoping literature review of crowdsourcing controls. Finally, the chapter identifies gaps and puts forth a research agenda to address these shortcomings. The research agenda focuses on understanding how to employ the controls needed to perform macro-tasking in crowds and the implications for crowdsourcing system designers.National Science Foundation grant CHS-1617820Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/150493/1/Robert 2019 Preprint Chapter 3.pdfDescription of Robert 2019 Preprint Chapter 3.pdf : PrePrint Versio

How Collaboration Software Enables Globally Distributed Software Development Teams to Become Agile - An Effective Use Perspective

Offshored, distributed teams increasingly use agile software development methodologies. Since agile software development practices were originally developed for co-located teams, distributed teams are required to use tools in order to achieve agility. This study is the first to adopt the lens of effective use theory in order to explore the role of tools in achieving agility, and other favorable project outcomes despite geographic distribution. First, we present Effective Use Theory and contextualize it for outsourced, agile software development projects. After this contextualization of Effective Use Theory, we present our exploratory, longitudinal case study and the four data sources we will use as a basis for our empirical investigation. Then, we develop measures that will enable us to study effective use behaviors empirically for the first time. The paper Ends with expected results and implications for literature on IS outsourcing, agile software development, tool use literature, and for managerial practice