Challenges of Community and Crowd

There are many challenges to handling Community/Crowd. Here are the primary ones:

• Building the Community/Crowd to a size sufficient for impact can take time and requires work and patience.

• Loss of control and lack of trust. This is perhaps the most challenging aspect of managing a Crowd and/or Community. Asking a direct report to do something has a much more certain outcome than asking the Community (or Crowd) and hoping for a result.

• For big companies, extending trust into the community is an enormous challenge. 

• Managing any group is always difficult. This is particularly true when a Community is very large. Crowds are usually so large and independent that they cannot be managed, only influenced.

• Cultural and linguistic misunderstandings can cause enormous (and unnecessary) stress. 

• Any community (especially a large one) will cross multiple time zones, making communications a challenge.

• Ensuring everyone signs up to the MTP is critical but difficult. Further, engagement with MTP is difficult to gauge: one person might commit 100% of their time and attention to the MTP, while someone else will intersect with it as a side interest. Navigating that variation is difficult for the core team. 

• The biggest challenge of dealing with a Crowd? You have no idea what you’ll get.