User:Groceryheist

Hi I'm Nate! I contribute to this wiki as a member of the Community Data Science Collective.

I grew up in Eastern Washington, where I worked in a glass Laboratory at PNNL where I contributed to a number of material science papers. I went to college at Whitworth University where I received a double-B.S. in Mathematics and Computer Science in 2012. As an undergrad I was part of a humble bioinformatics research group and contributed to research in structured search engines. After this I worked at Microsoft for a couple of years where I did a number of small things mainly related to search suggestions for Bing multimedia. After this I worked as a data science consultant in medical informatics. I've been a Linux user since 2006. I contribute to Wikipedia and to free software projects when I can.

These days I am an MA/PhD student at the University of Washington primarily interested in online communities and politics. I'm particularly interested in how organizational norms, practices, and forms emerge (constructed and adopted) or are disrupted (replaced by new forms). I hope that understanding this will help expand and improve management of the commons. I'm also interested in how online communities self--organize and interface with social movements and political organizations. I draw on my computer science background to operationalize interesting concepts from digital trace data.

I recently published (and presented at CHI) a short paper on community lifecycles and newcomer retention in wikis. Check it out: https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=3173929

My next most developed project (with Mako and Aaron) is titled "Density dependence without resource partitioning on a Digital Mobilization Platform: Population ecology of collective actions on Change.org." This uses topic models to study competition between online petitions. I presented this research at the Internet Policy and Politics Conference at Oxford in 2016 and will present at ICA in 2017. Preprints of the full version may be available soon.

My main hobbies are skiing, rock climbing, guitar playing, listening to music, and cooking. I'm married to Amanda, a community organizer and student at UW medical school.