Online Communities and Crowds (Spring 2025)

Online Communities & Crowds

Communication Studies 378

M/W 10am-11:20am CT

Frances Searle Building, Room 3-417

Spring, 2025

Northwestern University

Course websites

This wiki page for syllabus, schedule, links to readings.

Canvas for announcements, submitting assignments, files, and grading.

Wikipedia Assignment dashboard for everything related to the Wikipedia Assignment.

Instructor: Aaron Shaw (aaronshaw@northwestern.edu)

"Shawffice" Hours: M, 2-4pm (scheduled slots); W, 1-3pm (drop-in), or by-appointment.

Please signup if you'd like a scheduled slot.

Frances Searle Bldg, Room 1-140 (preferred) or remote (Location and details).

8-bit style "Online communities & crowds" graphic (2025, Aaron + Co-Pilot AI)

Course information

Overview

Online communities and crowds are everywhere from your social feeds and group chats to the training data that powers generative AI models and global software infrastructure. So, how do online communities and crowds work? Why have they had such vast impact? What can we learn from them to help build thriving communities and collective endeavors online and beyond?

This course seeks to understand online communities & crowds. It does so through an interdisciplinary inquiry into practical challenges that confront online communities & crowds today. When and why do some efforts to overcome these challenges succeed? What insights and expectations can we draw from these experiences?

Learning objectives

The course is designed to enable students to achieve the following goals:

• Understand and critically engage central concepts, examples, and issues relevant to online communities & crowds.
• Cultivate practical experience with online collaboration (in online communities and crowds).
• Assess and iteratively improve upon your own work and that of your peers in light of the concerns analyzed in class.
• Elaborate original insights into online communities & crowds; extend and apply the material presented in class.

Format and materials

The course consists of a combination of lecture and discussion. The lectures will synthesize a variety of historical, theoretical, and empirical materials. The discussion sections will focus on weekly assignments.

All readings and other materials for the course will be linked from this page and/or posted on Canvas.

Assignments and responsibilities

The course includes "weekly" and "project" assignments.

Every week all participants are responsible for (1) attending course meetings; (2) completing assigned readings, observations, or activities; and (3) participating in in-class discussions of course material. As part of this last item, I will circulate a small set of discussion prompts ahead of time that you can use to prepare. More information about how I'll use the discussion prompts appears below and we will talk about them during the first class session.

The "project" assignments are (1) the Wikipedia Assignment; and (2) the Community Advising Report. Details of both are provided below.

In general, written assignments submitted for the course should be uploaded as a PDF via Canvas.

In terms of other responsibilities, I recommend you familiarize yourself with Aaron's assessment policies (especially the assessment rubric for written work) as well as salient principles on academic integrity, especially the appropriate attribution of sources. Please submit written work in a readable (size 11 or greater) font and adopt a standard citation style (e.g., APA, Chicago, or PACM HCI) throughout. Please include your name somewhere (prominent!) in the document that you submit as well as your last name at the beginning of the filename (e.g., "Shaw-occ-week1.pdf").

Weekly assignments

The course schedule provides details of all reading assignments as well as links to materials and Canvas pages for submitting written assignments. Specifics for several types of assignments follow below.

Discussion prompts

The discussion prompts are a set of questions focused on the materials assigned for class for the week. At some point during most of our class sessions, I (Aaron) will cold-call people in the room to address a question inspired by or taken from the discussion prompts. By "cold call" I mean that I will call on people without asking for volunteers first. I will assess the responses to these questions for evidence that you have engaged with key aspects of the course material. In some cases, there won't be a singular "right" answer. I won't grade your answers, but will mark them complete/incomplete.

A goal here is to support accountability to the readings, attendance, preparation for the class, etc. That said, I understand that things come up. During the quarter you can "pass" on cold call questions twice. If you are absent and called upon and I haven't heard from you about the absence ahead of time, it will use one of your passes. If you anticipate being absent, you may contact me in advance to avoid using one of your passes. I will provide a supplementary assignment.

Because I understand that cold calling may be terrifying, I will circulate the discussion prompts ahead of time. The discussion prompts will include the kinds of questions I am likely to ask each week (in some cases, maybe even the same questions). They will also give you a good sense of where to focus your reading and note-taking. It is a good idea to do the readings with these questions in mind, to take notes guided by these questions, and/or to write out answers to these questions in advance. You are also welcome to work with other students, consult other resources, etc. to brainstorm or discuss possible answers outside of class (I will not collect your written responses or any records of your discussions).

Randomness will play a role in the cold calling. Ahead of each class session, I will use a computer program to generate a randomly ordered list of students and I will use this list to guide the cold calling in class. To try to maintain participation balance, the algorithm I use will try to ensure that everybody is cold called a similar number of times during the quarter. Although there is always some chance that you will called next, you will be less likely to be called upon relative to your classmates each time you are called upon.

Project assignments

Project assignments include the Wikipedia Assignment as well as the Community Advising Report. Brief descriptions follow here with additional details provided via linked pages.

The Wikipedia Assignment:

All members of the course will write (or at least significantly expand) Wikipedia articles. This assignment will take place over about six weeks starting at the beginning of the quarter. It will culminate in a brief written report offering advice/insights on the basis of your experience and materials you have encountered in the course.

Please review this overview of the assignment and assessment criteria. Details of specific assignment milestones and deadlines will be (almost entirely) provided through the course WikiEdu Dashboard.

Deadlines (See WikiEdu Dashboard for specific assignments and most up-to-date/accurate deadlines)

Week 1: Create an account, join the course page, learn some basics

Week 2: Learn some rules, evaluate an article, choose possible article topics

Week 3: Edit existing articles/citations, finalize article selection, find sources for your article

Week 4: Start more substantial editing your article

Week 5: Peer review two article, continue improving your article.

Week 6: Respond to peer review, polish your article.

Week 7: Final revisions to articles; Wikipedia Advising Report (1000 words max) due.

The Wikipedia Advising Report will be due May 16, 5pm. Please see the assignment page for details regarding submission requirements.

Community Advising Report

You will also be required to complete a 2000 word (maximum—this works out to about 8-10pp if using a size 12 standard font, margins, and spacing) Community Advising Report. For this report, you are invited to serve as an expert advisor to the leaders and members of an online community or crowd and to provide evidence-based insights into how to better address a specific challenge they face.

Detailed information about the assignment is available here

For this assignment, you will select your own community/crowd and challenge. I encourage you to choose a community/crowd of which you are a member/leader and where you could, even if only in theory, deliver your recommendations to other members/leaders and have some chance of seeing the recommendations debated/adopted. I expect you to draw on sources and evidence provided as part of the course (readings, lecture, other materials, etc.). You may, but absolutely do not need to draw on additional sources. Please note that I require you to write up a proposal and secure written approval of your chosen community/crowd and challenge. I also ask everyone to deliver a very brief "lightning talk" introducing the setting and challenge (and, if possible, recommendations) of your project during the final week of class.

Topic proposal due for review/approval: May 21 (5pm)

Lightning talk presentation of your project topic/setting: Week of June 2

Report due: Tuesday, June 10 (5pm)

Grading and assessment

Aaron will assign grades (usually a number between 0-10) that assess your performance on the specific elements of the course listed in the table below. For each element, grades start with the maximum possible value and only decrease in the event of a specific failure to meet some aspect of the relevant assessment rubric (more on those below). The percentage values are weights that will be applied to calculate your overall grade for the course.

Course element
Participation (including Discussion prompts)	35%
Wikipedia assignment exercises + article	15%
Wikipedia Advising Report	10%
Community Advising Report Proposal	5%
Community Advising Report Lightning Talk	10%
Community Advising Report	25%

For detailed assessment rubrics that will be used to derive grades for all assignments, please see the corresponding assignment page as well as Aaron's general assessment page. Other relevant information about academic integrity policies, grade appeals (requests to regrade), and more can be found on the general course policies page.

Policies

General course policies

General policies (including links to Northwestern's recommended policies) on a wide variety of topics including classroom equity, attendance, academic integrity, accommodations, late assignments, generative AI, and more are provided on Aaron's class policies page. Below are some policy statements that may be specific to this course and quarter.

Expectations for class sessions

The following are some baseline expectations. Please feel free to ask questions, suggest changes, or raise concerns during the quarter. I welcome all input. Also, if you feel that I can do anything to support these expectations more effectively, please let me know.

• All members of the class are expected to contribute to creating a supportive, welcoming, and respectful environment.
• All members of the class are expected to take reasonable steps to create an effective teaching/learning environment for themselves and others.

In-class discussion

Discussions are meant to provide you with an opportunity to confront, challenge, and explore the major themes of each week in a safe, respectful environment. Your active participation is indispensable, so come prepared, ready to test out ideas and hypotheses. Please keep in mind that participation is about more than who speaks the most. It is also about demonstrating a willingness to think through your own and others’ ideas. Some ground rules:

• Respect others’ rights to hold opinions and beliefs different from yours. If you disagree, challenge the idea, not the person.
• Listen carefully to what others are saying even when you disagree. Comments that you make (asking for clarification, sharing critiques, expanding on a point, etc.) should reflect that you have paid attention to the speaker’s comments.
• Be courteous. Don’t interrupt or engage in private conversations while others are speaking.
• Support your statements. Use evidence and provide a rationale for your points.
• Allow everyone the chance to talk. If you have spoken a lot already, try to hold back a bit; if you are hesitant to speak, look for opportunities to contribute to the discussion.

Academic freedom, speech, and expression

I welcome and support the expression and exchange of diverse perspectives in my classes. As such, I do not grant permission for any recording, sharing, observation, reporting, posting, or republication of any statements made (by me or others) in the context of a class for the purpose of wider dissemination or for any purpose not expressly permitted under applicable Northwestern rules and policies.

I am also committed to supporting student speech and engagement in social and political activity beyond the classroom. Ongoing federal investigations of Northwestern University and its personnel; deportations, visa revocations, and disciplinary actions targeting students, faculty, and staff on the basis of their speech; as well as other recent events have not altered my commitments in this regard.

Syllabus revisions

This syllabus will be a dynamic document that will evolve throughout the quarter. Although the core expectations are fixed, the details will shift. As a result, please keep in mind the following:

1. Assignments and readings are frozen 1 week before they are due. I will not add readings or assignments less than one week before they are due. If I forget to add something or fill in a "To Be Determined" less than one week before it's due, it is dropped. If you plan to read or work more than one week ahead, contact me first.
2. Substantial changes to the syllabus or course materials will be announced. Please monitor your email for Canvas messages about changes. Also, whenever I make changes, these changes will be recorded in the edit history of this page in case you want to track what has changed.
3. Changes will usually reduce/change work, only rarely augment. I tend to be a little over-ambitious with my syllabus content and then dial that back as I sort out what can be tossed overboard.
4. The course design may adapt throughout the quarter. As usual (for me at least), I may iterate and prototype course design elements rapidly along the way. To this end, I will ask you for voluntary feedback—especially toward the beginning of the quarter. Please let me know what is working and what can be improved. In the past, I have made many adjustments based on this feedback and I expect to do so again.

Additional resources/readings

Throughout the quarter, we will might generate lists of related topics, readings, videos, memes, etc. You can add things to that list here

Schedule (with all the details)

Week 1: Origins (04.01, 04.02)

Lectures

1. Introduction
2. Course logistics
3. Birth of the "modem world"

Assignments

• Complete the course welcome survey (link to a google form via Canvas).
• Kevin Driscoll. 2022. The Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media. Yale UP. Chapter 1 (p. 1--28).
• The BBS Documentary (watch the first video/part. Feel free to watch more if you get into it).
• Complete Week 1 Wikipedia Assignment exercises.

Additional resources (not required! optional!)

• John Perry Barlow. 1996. A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.
• Katie Hafner. 1997. The epic saga of The WELL. Wired Magazine. (Long magazine article!)
• Stanford 2011 symposium: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Steve Jobs. 2005. Commencement Address. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. (Note: you can watch or read this one in various places)
• Margaret O'Mara. 2019 The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Penguin Press.
• Fred Turner. 2005. Where the counterculture met the new economy: The WELL and the origins of virtual community. Technology and Culture.

Week 2: Definitions (04.07, 04.09)

Lectures

1. What (was|is) a community anyway?
2. Crowds: Their madness and wisdom
3. Defining online communities & crowds

Assignments

• Week 2 Discussion Prompts
• Oldenburg, Ray. 1989. The great good place: Cafés, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts, and how they get you through the day. Paragon House Publishers. Chapter 1 ("The Problem of Place in America") and Chapter 2 ("The Character of Third Places").
• Bruckman, Amy. 2006. A new perspective on ‘community’ and its implications for computer-mediated communication systems. In Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 616-621. (Also available from Amy Bruckman's website)
• Complete Week 2 Wikipedia Assignment exercises

Additional (optional!) resources

• Bruckman, Amy. 2016. The Rheingold test.
• Kim, Amy Jo. 1998. Nine timeless principles for building community. Available via New Architect magazine archives.
• Aniket Kittur, Jeffrey V. Nickerson, Michael Bernstein, Elizabeth Gerber, Aaron Shaw, John Zimmerman, Matt Lease, and John Horton. 2013. The future of crowd work. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference on Computer supported cooperative work (CSCW '13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1301–1318.

Week 3: Participation (04.16)

Lectures

1. Motivating participation + Participation inequalities (recorded lectures from 2022!)
2. "Too much democracy in all the wrong places"

Assignments

• Week 3 Discussion Prompts
• Kraut & Resnick. Building Successful Online Communities. Encouraging contributions to online communities (Chapter 2) (pdf from Kraut's Web site).
• Complete Week 3 Wikipedia Assignment exercises

Useful resources for case study on Twitch (For Wednesday)

• Andrew, Scottie. 2021. Black and LGBTQ streamers on Twitch boycotted the platform after repeated ‘hate raids’. CNN. September 2, 2021.
• Broadway, Danielle. 2022. Racist Abuse on Twitch Is Holding Black Beauty Creators Back. Allure.com. March 11, 2022.
• Clark, Taylor. 2017. How to Get Rich Playing Video Games Online. New Yorker, November 13, 2017.
• Hernandez, Patricia. 2018. The Twitch Streamers Who Spend Years Broadcasting to No One. The Verge. July 16, 2018.
• Grayson, Nathan. 2018. Twitch Partners Feeling Burned After Affiliates Receive Features That Took Them Years To Earn. Kotaku. June 14, 2018.
• The Differences Between Twitch Partner and Affiliate Programs. 2019. GameOnAire (blog). April 5, 2019.
• Achievements. n.d. Twitch. Accessed January 15, 2022.

Additional resources

• Buechley, L. and Hill, B. M. 2010. LilyPad in the wild: How hardware's long tail is supporting new engineering and design communities. Proceedings of the ACM Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) Conference.
• Catherine Han, Joseph Seering, Deepak Kumar, Jeffrey T. Hancock, and Zakir Durumeric. 2023. Hate Raids on Twitch: Echoes of the Past, New Modalities, and Implications for Platform Governance. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 7, CSCW1, Article 133 (April 2023), 28 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3579609.
• Herskowitz, Matthew. 2024. “Meet One of the Most Prolific People on Yelp.” Eater. July 18, 2024. https://www.eater.com/24200490/yelp-elite-frequent-reviewer-interviewer.
• Kelty, Christopher, M. 2017. Too Much Democracy in All the Wrong Places: Toward a Grammar of Participation. Current Anthropology 2017 58:S15, S77-S90
• Kelty, C. and Erickson, S. 2018. Two modes of participation: A conceptual analysis of 102 cases of Internet and social media participation from 2005–2015. The Information Society, 34(2): 71–87.
• van de Rijt et al. 2014. Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS).
• Dunbar-Hester, Christina. 2020. Hacking diversity: The politics of inclusion in open technology cultures. (Chapters 1, 7, 8)

Week 4: Newcomers (04.21, 04.23)

Lectures

1. Newcomer recruitment and socialization
2. On the varieties of newcomer experience

Assignments

• Week 4 Discussion Prompts
• Kraut & Resnick. Building Successful Online Communities, Dealing with newcomers (Chapter 5) (pdf from Kraut's Web site).
• Charles Kiene, Andrés Monroy-Hernández, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2016. Surviving an "Eternal September": How an Online Community Managed a Surge of Newcomers. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1152–1156. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858356
• Posting Guidelines, r/nosleep Wiki. Accessed April 16, 2025.
• Complete Week 4 Wikipedia Assignment exercises

Additional resources

• Susan L. Bryant, Andrea Forte, and Amy Bruckman. 2005. Becoming Wikipedian: transformation of participation in a collaborative online encyclopedia. In Proceedings of the 2005 international ACM SIGGROUP conference on Supporting group work (GROUP '05).
• Corey Brian Jackson, Carsten Østerlund, Kevin Crowston, Mahboobeh Harandi, and Laura Trouille. 2020. Shifting forms of Engagement: Volunteer Learning in Online Citizen Science. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 036, 19 pages.
• Aaron Halfaker, Aniket Kittur, and John Riedl. 2011. Don't bite the newbies: How reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work. In Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration (WikiSym '11). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 163--172.
• Casey Fiesler and Brianna Dym. 2020. Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW1, Article 042 (May 2020), 25 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3392847
• Preece, Jennifer and Schneiderman, Ben. 2009. The reader-to-leader framework: Motivating technology-mediated social participation. AIS Transaction on Human-Computer Interaction.
• Seering et al. 2020. Proximate social factors in first-time contribution to online communities. CHI.
• Sneha Narayan, Jake Orlowitz, Jonathan Morgan, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Aaron Shaw. 2017. The Wikipedia Adventure: Field Evaluation of an Interactive Tutorial for New Users. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17).

Week 5: Identity (04.28, 04.30)

Lectures

1. Identity: The presentation of online self
2. Privacy, context, and disclosure
3. Anonymity: Threat or menace?

Assignments

• Week 5 Discussion Prompts
• Complete Week 5 Wikipedia Assignment exercises
• Nazanin Andalibi, Oliver L. Haimson, Munmun De Choudhury, and Andrea Forte. 2016. Understanding Social Media Disclosures of Sexual Abuse Through the Lenses of Support Seeking and Anonymity. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3906–3918. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858096 (via De Choudhury's website).
• Kishonna L. Gray. 2012. Intersecting oppressions and online communities. Information, Communication & Society, 15:3, 411-428, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.642401

Additional resources

• Bernstein, M., Monroy-Hernández, A., Harry, D., André, P., Panovich, K., & Vargas, G. 2011. 4chan and /b/: An Analysis of Anonymity and Ephemerality in a Large Online Community. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media, 5(1), 50-57.
• Julian Dibbell (1993, Dec 23). A rape in cyberspace: How an evil clown, a Haitian trickster spirit, two wizards, and a cast of dozens turned a database into a society. The Village Voice.
• Judith Donath. 1998. Identity and deception in the virtual community. In Kollock, P. and Smith, M. (eds). Communities in Cyberspace. London: Routledge. pp. 37-68.
• Benjamin Mako Hill, Aaron Shaw. The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Peer Production. Communication Research (2020): 0093650220910345.
• Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. (excerpts)
• K. L. Gray. 2012. Deviant bodies, stigmatized identities, and racist acts: examining the experiences of African-American gamers in Xbox Live, New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia, 18:4, 261-276, https://10.1080/13614568.2012.746740

Week 6: Governance (05.05, 05.07)

Lectures

1. Rules, norms, governance: A crude and brief synthesis
2. Governance in practice

Assignments

• Week 6 Discussion Prompts
• Kiesler, S, Kittur, A., Kraut, R., & Resnick, P. 2012. Regulating behavior in online communities in Kraut, R. and Resnick, P. Building Successful Online Communities (Chapter 4; focus for first half—through p. 21— for Mon.; the rest for Wed.).
• Complete Week 6 Wikipedia Assignment exercises

Case resources (for Monday)

• Fiesler, Casey, Jialun Jiang, Joshua McCann, Kyle Frye, and Jed Brubaker. 2018. Reddit Rules! Characterizing an Ecosystem of Governance. Proceedings of the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media (ICWSM) 12 (1). https://doi.org/10.1609/icwsm.v12i1.15033.
• Rules side-bar (right-hand side of the page) for the following subreddits (for some, you'll have expand each rule):
  • r/AmItheAsshole
  • r/nosleep (again)
  • r/Northwestern
• Yelp's guidelines (be sure to click 'expand all')

Case resources (for Wednesday)

• Johnson, Anne. 2014. “Policing The Trolls: The Ins and Outs of Comment Moderation.” NPR, September 24, 2014, sec. Fairness & Accuracy. https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2014/09/24/348775874/policing-the-trolls-the-ins-and-outs-of-comment-moderation.
• Lomas, Natasha. 2015. “Can Civil Comments Kill The Internet Troll?” TechCrunch (blog). October 31, 2015. https://techcrunch.com/2015/10/31/can-civil-comments-kill-internet-trolls/.
• Schneider, Daniel J. and Errc Lubbers. 2017. “Our Article Comments Have Been a Cesspool of Trolls and Spam for Years. Enter Civil Comments.” The Denver Post (blog). May 23, 2017. https://www.denverpost.com/2017/05/22/denver-post-civil-comments/.

Additional resources

• Gillespie, Tarleton. 2018. Governance of and by platforms. In Sage Handbook of Social Media, Jean Burgess,Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick (eds).
• Hampton, Rachelle. 2019. The black feminists who saw the alt-right coming. Slate.
• Horta Ribeiro, Manoel, Shagun Jhaver, Savvas Zannettou, Jeremy Blackburn, Gianluca Stringhini, Emiliano De Cristofaro, and Robert West. 2021. Do Platform Migrations Compromise Content Moderation? Evidence from r/The_Donald and r/Incels. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 5, CSCW2, Article 316 (October 2021), 24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3476057
• Ilori, Tomiwa. 2020. Content moderation is particularly hard in African countries. Slate.
• Massachi, Saher. 2021. How to save our social media by treating it like a city. MIT Technology Review.
• Schneider, Nathan. 2021. Admins, Mods, and Benevolent Dictators for Life: The Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities. New Media & Society.

Week 7: Quality (05.12, 05.14)

Lectures

1. How do they do it? Community production dynamics
2. Social production, social failures

Assignments

• Week 7 Discussion Prompts
• Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold, Aaron Shaw. Unpublished manuscript. Peer Production: A Concise Introduction. (For Monday: read chapter 1; skim chapters 2-3; read chapter 4. For Wednesday: read 5).
• [Watch the video of the talk (for Monday)] Casey Fiesler, Shannon Morrison, and Amy S. Bruckman. 2016. An Archive of Their Own: A Case Study of Feminist HCI and Values in Design. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858409 (for Monday. Please watch the presentation video that is archived on the same page as the paper. For our purposes, you don't need to read the paper!).
• Complete Week 7 Wikipedia Assignment exercises
• Submit Wikipedia Advising Report (Due May 16 5pm).

Additional resources

• Ashley Colley, Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Allen Yilun Lin, Donald Degraen, Benjamin Fischman, Jonna Häkkilä, Kate Kuehl, Valentina Nisi, Nuno Jardim Nunes, Nina Wenig, Dirk Wenig, Brent Hecht, and Johannes Schöning. 2017. The Geography of Pokémon GO: Beneficial and Problematic Effects on Places and Movement. In Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025495
• Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press. Ch. 2 excerpt (pp. 29-34) & Ch. 3 (all).
• King, Gary, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts. (2017). How the Chinese government fabricates social media posts for strategic distraction, not engaged argument. American Political Science Review 111, no. 3: 484-501.
• Stallman, R. (1984). The GNU manifesto.
• Stallman, R. (1989). The GNU general public license, version 1.
• Kate Starbird, Ahmer Arif, and Tom Wilson. 2019. Disinformation as Collaborative Work: Surfacing the Participatory Nature of Strategic Information Operations. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 3, CSCW, Article 127 (November 2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3359229
• von Hippel, E. (2012). The Paradigm Shift from Producer to User Innovation (video lecture).
• von Hippel, E. (2012). Users Working Together in Communities are Powerful Innovators (video lecture).
• von Hippel, E. (2005). Democratizing innovation. MIT Press.

Week 8: Profit (05.19, 05.21)

Lectures

1. A withering critique of contemporary information capitalism
2. Whither alternatives?

Assignments

• Week 8 Discussion Prompts
• Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri. 2019. Ghost Work. Read Introduction and Chapter 1 for Monday; Chapters 3 and 6 for Wednesday (And if you like the book, any other chapters and the Conclusion are optional). (Selections Available via Canvas or the Internet Archive)
• (Wednesday) Community Advising Report topic proposals due this week (no later than Wednesday 5/21 at 5pm). (Note: you must submit the proposal in order to receive approval of your final project topic).

Additional resources

• Davis, Gerald F., and Aseem Sinha. Varieties of Uberization: How technology and institutions change the organization (s) of late capitalism. Organization Theory 2, no. 1 (2021): 2631787721995198.
• Juliet B. Schor and Manuel Vallas. 2020. The sharing economy: Rhetoric and reality. Annual Review of Sociology.
• Juliet B. Schor. 2020. After the gig: How the sharing economy got hijacked and how to win it back. University of California Press.
• Abhishek Nagaraj and Henning Piezunka. 2020 (unpublished ms). How Competition Affects Contributions to Open Source Platforms: Evidence from OpenStreetMap and Google Maps.
• Nathan Schneider. 2018. An internet of ownership: Democratic design for the online economy. The Sociological Review 66, no. 2 (March 2018): 320–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026118758533
• Shoshanna Zuboff. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Week 9: AI (05.28)

Lectures

1. The ubiquity of bots, algorithms, and machine intelligence in online communities
2. FATE, disintermediation, collapse, and other horizons of AI

Assignments

• Week 9 Discussion Prompts
• R Maria del Rio-Chanona, Nadzeya Laurentsyeva, Johannes Wachs, Large language models reduce public knowledge sharing on online Q&A platforms. PNAS Nexus, Volume 3, Issue 9, September 2024, pgae400, https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgae400. [Note: focus on the substance of the Introduction, Results, and Discussion sections (don't worry about understanding the methods).]
• Simpson, Ellen and Bryan Semaan. 2021. For You, or For"You"? Everyday LGBTQ+ Encounters with TikTok. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 4, CSCW3, Article 252 (December 2020), 34 pages. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3432951

Additional resources

• DeVito, Michael Ann . 2021. Adaptive Folk Theorization as a Path to Algorithmic Literacy on Changing Platforms. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 5, CSCW2, Article 339 (October 2021), 35 pages, https://doi.org/10.1145/3476080.
• Geiger, R. Stuart (2014). Bots, bespoke, code and the materiality of software platforms. Information, Communication & Society. DOI:10.1080/1369118X.2013.873069 (preprint version)
• Massanari, Adrienne. "#Gamergate and The Fappening: How Reddit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocultures." New media & society 19, no. 3 (2017): 329-346.

Week 10: The Future (06.02, 06.04)

Lectures

1. The future of online communities & crowds

Assignments

• Final project lightning talks + feedback this week.
• Work on your Community Advising Reports.

Acknowledgments and Credits

This course design and syllabus builds from prior iterations as well as similar/adjacent courses offered by Joseph Reagle (Northeastern University); Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington, Seattle); Nathan TeBlunthuis (University of Texas at Austin), Kaylea Champion (University of Washington, Bothell); Casey Fiesler (University of Colorado at Boulder); Amy Bruckman (Georgia Institute of Technology); Sarita Yardi Schoenbeck (University of Michigan); Nazanin Andalibi (University of Michigan); and Nicole Ellison (University of Michigan). It has also been shaped by input from past students in the course and past teaching assistants (Sneha Narayan, Jeremy Foote, and Sohyeon Hwang) as well as current participants. Some of the language and policies were co-authored with Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern).