Open Covid-19: Organizing an extreme crowdsourcing campaign to tackle grand challenges

Abstract

This article presents an extreme crowdsourcing case to tackle grand challenges such as Covid-19. Researchers became more interested in crowds’ involvement to deal with grand challenges and scholars reported the use of crowdsourcing in producing innovative solutions to solve these challenges. Driven by recent calls for more research to examine forms of socially motivated interaction options in order to support crowds in dealing with these ill-defined problems, this research conducts a qualitative study of how an extreme crowdsourcing program – Open Covid-19 launched by Just One Giant Lab to develop and test low-cost solutions to tackle the pandemic – was organized. By examining conditions for coordination and knowledge exchange in the Open Covid-19 case, we present an open structure where the challenges of predictability and common understanding have to be managed continuously and the participants themselves gradually build accountability; multidisciplinary knowledge integration is achieved by exchanging efforts and skills, and extreme transparency contributes positively in building a collective project memory. These findings are theoretically important because they clarify how extreme crowdsourcing can be organized to deal with grand challenges.