Understanding the role of community in crowdfunding work

Julie S. Hui, Michael D. Greenberg, Elizabeth M. Gerber

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

149 Scopus citations

Abstract

Crowdfunding provides a new opportunity for entrepreneurs to launch ventures without having to rely on traditional funding mechanisms, such as banks and angel investing. Despite its rapid growth, we understand little about how crowdfunding users build ad hoc online communities to undertake this new way of performing entrepreneurial work. To better understand this phenomenon, we performed a qualitative study of 47 entrepreneurs who use crowdfunding platforms to raise funds for their projects. We identify community efforts to support crowdfunding work, such as providing mentorship to novices, giving feedback on campaign presentation, and building a repository of example projects to serve as models. We also identify where community efforts and technologies succeed and fail at supporting the work in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2014 - Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages62-74
Number of pages13
ISBN (Print)9781450325400
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014 - Baltimore, MD, United States
Duration: Feb 15 2014Feb 19 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore, MD
Period2/15/142/19/14

Keywords

  • Community
  • Crowd work
  • Crowdfunding
  • Distributed work
  • Entrepreneurship
  • Support tools

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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