  To begin to understand the implications of the implementation of IT-mediated
Crowds for Politics and Policy purposes, this research builds the first-known
dataset of IT-mediated Crowd applications currently in use in the governance
context. Using Crowd Capital theory and governance theory as frameworks to
organize our data collection, we undertake an exploratory data analysis of some
fundamental factors defining this emerging field. Specific factors outlined and
discussed include the type of actors implementing IT-mediated Crowds in the
governance context, the global geographic distribution of the applications, and
the nature of the Crowd-derived resources being generated for governance
purposes. The findings from our dataset of 209 on-going endeavours indicates
that a wide-diversity of actors are engaging IT-mediated Crowds in the
governance context, both jointly and severally, that these endeavours can be
found to exist on all continents, and that said actors are generating
Crowd-derived resources in at least ten distinct governance sectors. We discuss
the ramifications of these and our other findings in comparison to the research
literature on the private-sector use of IT-mediated Crowds, while highlighting
some unique future research opportunities stemming from our work.

Computers and Society;Human-Computer Interaction