# An Organizational and Governance Model to Support Mass Collaborative Learning Initiatives
## 1 Introduction
* It enables learners to share knowledge and experiences and learn from each other, thereby promoting their capabilities in obtaining rapid yet significant progress. * It facilitates fast cycle learning toward impact at scale. * It increases global interactions with experts and peers. * It makes the process of learning relatively creative, cost-effective, and flexible. * It provides an easily accessible public digital data repository for all its members. It should be also added that the effective use of ICT tools in MCL communities does not only make learning more interactive and easier but also enhances the modes of communication. Despite the tremendous progress in this area, notable achievements, and positive results that MCL has obtained over the years, it still faces a set of challenges [1,3,6]:  
* There is insufficient evidence about the successful application of MCL in various fields. * The concept, organizational structure, and associated mechanism of MCL are still evolving. * The practice of mass collaboration in the learning community is not clearly formalized. * There are some ambiguities about the key strategies for stimulating people to join the community and to keep them motivated in providing contributions. As a result, this promising and complementary approach to learning still appears similar to a brand-new way of looking at a study that has not yet been revealed to everyone around the world. On top of that, the authors believe that neither the main components, dimensions, and features of MCL have been explicitly identified and explained, nor they have been all adequately assessed. Hence, the attention in this study is given to dealing with these specific issues by considering the fact that the MCL is still evolving in the education context and there are several different views and controversial assumptions about this subject. For instance, different researchers have different (but nearly close) understandings of the concept. The fundamental issues such as the principles, boundaries, formation, processes, and development of MCL communities are still vague. More specifically, it is extremely complicated for developers to apply MCL to different fields successfully and effectively. Certainly, every field or environment has its own demands and circumstances that need to be taken into account in advance [4]. All gathered evidence shows that this area of knowledge and research is still in its infancy but is growing up gradually and surely. Therefore, it requires in-depth reviews and further research, inquiries, analysis, and contributions to provide better clarifications. Given this context, the motives for conducting this study are the following:
* Filling part of the gap mentioned above;
* Identifying the influential factors that support the creation, operation, and development of MCL initiatives;
* Gaining some insights into the main features of an MCL community. Therefore, the key research question that emerges is as follows: _What could be an effective way of supporting community learning through mass collaboration?_ In that account, the main contribution of this study is to propose an organizational and governance model for MCL initiatives (OGM-MCL) by relying on a design science research method that serves to clarify how community learning can be supported by MC. The proposed hypothesis to address this research question is as follows: _Community learning can be effectively supported through mass collaboration if three streams of work are appropriately rooted in the foundation of a community: these include (I) identifying the positive and negative factors in existing and emerging successful examples of MC; (II) adopting contributions from collaborative networks in terms of structural and behavioral models; and (III) establishing adequate learning and performance assessment indicators and metrics._ The main contribution of this work is introducing the OGM-MCL designed to steer and support the process of the implementation, operation, and development of MCL initiatives.