  The increasing practice of engaging crowds, where organizations use IT to
connect with dispersed individuals for explicit resource creation purposes, has
precipitated the need to measure the precise processes and benefits of these
activities over myriad different implementations. In this work, we seek to
address these salient and non-trivial considerations by laying a foundation of
theory, measures, and research methods that allow us to test crowd-engagement
efficacy across organizations, industries, technologies, and geographies. To do
so, we anchor ourselves in the Theory of Crowd Capital, a generalizable
framework for studying IT-mediated crowd-engagement phenomena, and put forth an
empirical apparatus of testable measures and generalizable methods to begin to
unify the field of crowd science.
