Emerging Forms of Online Civic Engagement through Collaborative Production: Which Institutional settings favor Engaging the “crowd”? The Case of Data Crowdsourcing around Hurricane Sandy.

Since the adopting of information and communications technology (ICT), several waves of online collective action has emerged. Particularly since 2000, online collective action for building complex knowledge resources (such as free and open software projects and Wikipedia) has emerged and received substantial attention, constituting founding cases for an emerging model of common-based peer production. With further expansion of ICT over the last two years (2011 and 2012), we have seen a new wave or ulterior expansion of common-based peer production in forms of civic engagement. First, this article will provide a typology of civic engagement though collaborative production common-pool resourcing based on observations of a sample consisting of 300 emerging cases since 2010. Second, this article will provide an analysis of institutional design (considering features such as project promoter, scope, and modality of engagement) that might explain a project’s ability to engage participation. The empirical analysis will be based on analysis of data crowdsourcing projects for civic engagement around the damages caused by Hurricane Sandy, with a total of 40 cases identified. The methods will be based on web analysis and interviews.