Understanding the role of community in crowdfunding work

Crowdfunding provides a new opportunity for entrepre-neurs to launch ventures without having to rely on traditional funding mechanisms, such as banks and angel investing. Despite its rapid growth, we understand little about how crowdfunding users build ad hoc online communities to undertake this new way of performing entrepreneurial work. To better understand this phenomenon, we performed a qualitative study of 47 entrepreneurs who use crowdfunding platforms to raise funds for their projects. We identify community efforts to support crowdfunding work, such as providing mentorship to novices, giving feedback on campaign presentation, and building a repository of example projects to serve as models. We also identify where community efforts and technologies succeed and fail at support-ing the work in order to inform the design of crowdfunding support tools and systems.