CSCWD: Five characters in search of crowds

According to some researchers, the wave of crowds we are witnessing in recent years is another example of the challenges for the CSCW community, a line of research that fights against the dilemma of fragmentation. The reflexes of this phenomena in projects of different branches have caused a change of paradigm in how products and services are idealized and how the projects are conducted in a collaborative way. Successful examples have attracted the attention of entrepreneurs in various areas and increased the business vocabulary with terms like crowd wisdom, crowdsourcing, crowdfunding and open innovation. It is a different reality from the one we are used to in the context of groupware systems, and it brings new challenges that leave some relevant open research questions. This paper proposes a characterization of crowd computing systems, contextualizing the design activity within this domain, presents a research agenda in the context of CSCW and discusses possible implications of the mass phenomena on the line of action of the community of Computer Supported Cooperative Work in Design.