Abstract
Online collaborative problem solving (OCPS) refers to the use of social web technologies to garner netizens’ collective effort for problem solving and innovation tasks. The model has enabled organizations to involve online users in organizational works at large scale. However, success of this kind of initiatives depends much on, among other things, user engagement, or the amount of effort online users voluntarily devote to what are requested in an OCPS initiative. We argue that an important influence on user engagement in OCPS events is their experience when participating in the events. We further argue that Flow Theory by Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi (1988) provides much insights on how to improve this experience. In addition, we propose to measure the psychological construct “flow” through a novel physiological-psychometric approach. In this paper, detailed discussion of our theoretical standpoint and the design of a lab experiment to validate our hypotheses are provided.
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This study is sponsored by the National Science Foundation Grant #1322285. The usual NSF disclaimer applies.
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Nguyen, C., Oh, O., Alothaim, A., de Vreede, T., de Vreede, G.J. (2015). Engaging with Online Crowd: A Flow Theory Approach. In: Iyer, L.S., Power, D.J. (eds) Reshaping Society through Analytics, Collaboration, and Decision Support. Annals of Information Systems, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-11575-7_12
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