Online Communities and Crowds (Spring 2025)

Online Communities & Crowds

Communication Studies 378 (undergraduate)

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, and files.

Wikipedia Assignment dashboard for everything related to the Wikipedia Assignment.

Instructor: Aaron Shaw (aaronshaw@northwestern.edu)

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

Please signup if you'd like a scheduled slot.

[[User:Aaronshaw/OH|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 "irregular" 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 "irregular" assignments are (1) the Wikipedia Assignment; and (2) the Community Advising Reports. Details of both are provided below.

All 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 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 support accountability, assessment, and equitable participation in our class sessions. 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.

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.

Irregular assignments

Irregular assignments include the Wikipedia Assignment as well as several longer-form written assignments. Brief descriptions follow here with additional details provided via linked pages.

The Wikipedia Assignment:

All members of the course will create de novo Wikipedia articles. This assignment will take place over about six weeks starting at the beginning of the quarter. It will culminate in Community Advising Report #1.

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)

January 8: Introduction, Create an account, join the course page, learn some basics, evaluate an article

January 14: Review some more rules, Start working with your team, Choose possible article topics

January 21: Edit existing articles/citations, finalize article topic, start drafting articles

January 28: Exchange and respond to peer review of article drafts

February 4: Improve/polish articles, publish articles (move them into the main namespace)

February 11: Final revisions to articles before reflective essay.

February 18: Reflection essay due.

Community Advising Report 1 & 2

You will also be required to complete two Community Advising Reports (CAR1 and CAR2, for short). For each of these, 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 both assignments is available here

CAR1: 1600-1800 words For CAR1, I will ask you to provide advice to Wikipedia community leaders on one of several challenges (you will choose from among a set). In elaborating your recommendations to address the challenge, 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.

Update (Feb 2.): CA1 details have been posted

CAR2: 2000-2250 words For CAR2, 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. For CAR2 I expect you to draw on sources and evidence provided as part of the course (again) as well as any additional materials you deem relevant/useful. Please note that I require you to meet with me to discuss your plan and to secure written (email is fine) approval of your chosen community/crowd and challenge at least two weeks before CAR2 is due.

CAR1 details announced: February 2

CAR1 due: February 9

CAR2 topic proposal: February 9-March 2

CA2 due: March 16

Assessment rubric for CAR1 and CAR2

I will evaluate both CAR1 and CAR2 along the following dimensions and criteria, which overlap a great deal with Aaron's general assessment rubric for written work. Keep in mind, these dimensions and criteria don't correspond to specific point values or anything like that. They also tend to escalate in terms of difficulty. An exceptional paper does all of these things exceptionally; a very good paper does all of these things well; a good paper does most of these things well; etc.

Clarity & style: Is the paper readable and clear? Is it free of errors? Is the writing logically organized and coherent? Are sources appropriately cited/documented?

Quality of analysis: Does the paper provide clear, original, and well-supported arguments and interpretation? Does it identify and analyze the challenge(s) facing the community/crowd effectively? Where possible/reasonable, does the analysis draw on relevant evidence to support its claims and recommendations?

Scope: Does the argument adapt a suitable scope given the length constraints of the assignment? Does it provide a thorough and focused analysis of the key issues at hand? Is there an appropriate balance between high-level generalities and specific details?

Quality of insight: Does the paper propose a clear strategy, design, and/or actions in response to the challenge? Do the proposed strategy, design, and/or actions seem compelling and worth adopting given the evidence presented? Do the proposed strategies, designs, and/or actions reflect a creative and sophisticated synthesis of available evidence, relevant course materials, and other resources the author has chosen to draw upon?

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.

Grading and assessment

Aaron will assign grades (usually a number between 0-10) that assess your performance of several elements of the course listed in the table below. For each element, grades start with the maximum possible value (10) 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	Undergraduate	Graduate
Participation	20%	20%
Weekly assignments	15%	30%
Wikipedia assignment	15%	15%
Community Advising #1	10%	NA
Community Advising #2	20%	NA
Exam	20%	NA
Original research project	NA	35%

For detailed assessment rubrics that the teaching team will use 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, and more are provided on Aaron's class policies page. Below are some policy statements specific to this course and quarter.

COVID-19 Policies

Aaron's COVID-19 policies page provides specific COVID-19 policies mandated by Northwestern University. Several additional COVID-19-related policies follow below.

Teaching and learning in a pandemic

Even beyond my COVID-19 policies, the ongoing pandemic will impact this course in various ways, some of them obvious and tangible and others harder to pin down. On the obvious and tangible front, we have things like the fact that we will begin quarter remotely and, assuming we return to campus, will still be wearing masks when we do so. These will shape our collective experience in major ways.

On the "harder to pin down" side, even though (or maybe especially because) we've been doing this pandemic thing for a while now, many of us may experience elevated levels of exhaustion, stress, uncertainty and/or distraction. We may need to provide unexpected support to family, friends, or others in our communities. I have some personal experiences with this and I expect that many (all?) of you do too. It can be a difficult time.

It is important to acknowledge the realities of the situation and create the space to discuss and process them in the context of our class throughout the quarter. As your instructor and colleague, I commit to do my best to approach the course in an adaptive, generous, and empathetic way. I will try to be transparent and direct with you throughout—both with respect to the course material as well as the pandemic and the university's ongoing response to it. I ask that you try to extend a similar attitude towards everyone in the course. When you have questions, feedback, or concerns, please try to share them in an appropriate, empathetic way. If you require accommodations of any kind at any time (directly related to the pandemic or not), please contact me.

Expectations for class sessions

The following are some baseline expectations for our class sessions. Please feel free to ask questions, suggest changes, or raise concerns during the quarter. I welcome all input.

• All members of the class are expected to create a supportive and welcoming environment that is respectful of the conditions under which we are participating in this class.
• All members of the class are expected to take reasonable steps to create an effective teaching/learning environment for themselves and others.

Please note that these expectations apply independent of whatever modalities we use to hold the class!

Expectations for synchronous remote "lecture" sessions

And here are suggested protocols for any video/audio portions of the "lecture" portions of our class (i.e., the Wednesday meetings):

• Please mute your microphone whenever you're not speaking and learn to use "push-to-talk" if/when possible.
• Video is optional for students during lecture, although if you're willing/able to keep the instructors company in the video channel we always appreciate it.
• If possible, we ask you to enable video when you want to speak (ask a question, make a comment, etc.) or are in breakout rooms.
• If you need to excuse yourself at any time and for any reason you may do so.
• Children, family, pets, roommates, and others with whom you may share your workspace are welcome to join our class as needed. Please do your best to minimize distractions and disruptions to others in the course.

Expectations for in-person sessions

Please wear a suitable and well-fitting face covering over your nose and mouth for the duration of our time in class together.

I ask everyone to come to our in-person class sessions prepared to comply with all applicable university COVID-19 policies and guidelines. We will be following Northwestern's guidelines for instructional spaces, including the use of face coverings, consistent seating, and health monitoring using the Symptom Tracker app (either the mobile or web-based version is fine). We'll review this early in the quarter as Northwestern continues to update its policies and guidelines.

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 so that you can 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's most crucial and 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 undoubtedly generate a long list of related topics, readings, videos, memes, etc. You can add things to that list here

Schedule (with all the details)

Please note that the date provided for each week corresponds to the Wednesday session when we all meet together. Everyone also has discussion sections

Week 1: Origins (01.05)

Lectures

1. Introduction (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)
2. Course logistics (Part 1 and Part 2)
3. Birth of the "modem world" (via Zoom, recording (includes transcription))

Lecture slides (via Canvas)

Assignments

• Complete the readings/viewings below (note that graduate students should complete undergraduate+graduate readings)
• Enroll in our course Wikipedia Assignment (link and passcode distributed via Canvas)
• Complete Week 1 Wikipedia assignment exercises
• Join the course Discord server (invitation link distributed via Canvas)

Undergraduate

• 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!)
• The BBS Documentary (watch at least 15-20 minutes of the first video/part. Feel free to watch more if you get into it).

Graduate

• Driscoll, Kevin. Hobbyist inter-networking and the popular Internet imaginary: Forgotten histories of networked personal computing, 1978-1998. Doctoral Thesis, University of Southern California (Chapter 2-3; optional: skim Chapter 1).
• Turner, Fred. 2005. Where the counterculture met the new economy: The WELL and the origins of virtual community. Technology and Culture.

Additional resources (not required! optional!)

• Steve Jobs. 2005. Commencement Address. Stanford University, Stanford, CA. (Note: you can watch or read this one in various places)
• Stanford 2011 symposium: From Counterculture to Cyberculture: the Legacy of the Whole Earth Catalog.
• Margaret O'Mara. 2019 The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Penguin Press.

Week 2: Definitions (01.12)

Lectures

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

Lecture slides (via Canvas)

Assignments

• Complete Week 2 Wikipedia assignment exercises (due Friday)
• First reading quiz (378) and discussion memos (525) this week.

Undergraduate readings

• 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.

Graduate readings

• Hampton, Keith. 2016. Persistent and pervasive community: New communication technologies and the future of community. American Behavioral Scientist.
• O’Mahony, Siobhan, Lakhani, Karim. R. 2011. Organizations in the shadow of communities, In Marquis, C., Lounsbury, M., Greenwood, R. (eds.), Research in the Sociology of Organizations, vol. 33: Communities and Organizations: 3–36. Bingley, UK: Emerald Group. (Link is working paper / pre-print version).

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.
• Simmel, Georg. The web of group affiliations (canvas).

Week 3: Participation (01.19)

Lectures

1. Motivating participation (recordings)
2. Participation inequalities
3. "Too much democracy in all the wrong places"

Lecture slides (via Canvas)

Assignments

Undergraduate

• Kraut & Resnick. Building Successful Online Communities. Encouraging contributions to online communities (Chapter 2) (pdf from Kraut's Web site).
• 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.

Graduate

• van de Rijt et al. 2014. Field experiments of success-breeds-success dynamics. Proceedings of the National Academies of Sciences (PNAS).
• Shaw, Fiers, and Hargittai. Unpublished manuscript. Participation inequality in the gig economy.
• Dunbar-Hester, Christina. 2020. Hacking diversity: The politics of inclusion in open technology cultures. (Chapters 1, 7, 8)

Additional resources

• 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.

Additional resources about Twitch

• 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.
• The Differences Between Twitch Partner and Affiliate Programs. 2019. GameOnAire (blog). April 5, 2019.
• Achievements. n.d. Twitch. Accessed January 15, 2022.
• Grayson, Nathan. 2018. Twitch Partners Feeling Burned After Affiliates Receive Features That Took Them Years To Earn. Kotaku. June 14, 2018.

Week 4: Newcomers (01.26)

Lectures

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

Lecture slides (via Canvas)

Assignments

Wikipedia Assignment (all)

WikiEdu dashboard timeline for this week

• Article topic selection complete.
• Develop draft articles in sandbox/user namespace.
• Peer review another group's article late this week.

Undergraduate

• 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

Graduate

• 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

Additional resources

• Posting Guidelines, r/nosleep Wiki. Accessed January 25, 2022.
• 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).
• 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).
• Van Maanen, John. 1978. People processing: Strategies of organizational socialization, Organizational Dynamics, (7)1. 19-36.

Week 5: Identity (02.02)

Lectures

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

Lecture slides (via Canvas)

Assignments

Community Advising Assignment #1

• Challenge and setting details distributed on 2/2. Completed assignment due 2/9.

Wikipedia Assignment (all)

WikiEdu dashboard timeline for this week

• Expand draft articles
• Complete peer review of another group's article.

Undergraduate

• 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.
• Kishonna L. Gray. 2012. Intersecting oppressions and online communities. Information, Communication & Society, 15:3, 411-428, DOI: 10.1080/1369118X.2011.642401

Graduate

• Acquisti, Alessandro, Laura Brandimarte, and George Loewenstein. Privacy and human behavior in the age of information. Science 347.6221 (2015): 509-514.
• Hill, Benjamin Mako, and Aaron Shaw. The Hidden Costs of Requiring Accounts: Quasi-Experimental Evidence From Peer Production. Communication Research (2020): 0093650220910345.
• Nazanin Andalibi, Margaret E. Morris, and Andrea Forte. 2018. Testing Waters, Sending Clues: Indirect Disclosures of Socially Stigmatized Experiences on Social Media. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 2, CSCW, Article 19 (November 2018), 23 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3274288
• (optional) 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

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.
• Dibbell, J. (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.
• Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.
• 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 (02.09)

Lectures

1. Governing the digital commons: A crude and brief synthesis
2. Governance of and by (and within?) platforms
3. Order from chaos? Governance in autonomous communities

Lecture recordings (Panopto) and lecture slides (Canvas)

Guest speaker in class Wed.: Molly de Blanc (Debian Project, Gnome Project, Community Data Science Collective, NYU, and more)

Assignments

Community Advising Assignment #1

• CA1 details and instructions
• Completed assignment due 2/9.

Wikipedia Assignment (all)

WikiEdu dashboard timeline for this week

• Move article drafts into "main namespace."
• Revise articles in response to peer feedback.

Undergraduate

• 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).
• Gillespie, Tarleton. 2018. Governance of and by platforms. In Sage Handbook of Social Media, Jean Burgess,Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick (eds).
• Read and compare/contrast the GNOME Code of Conduct with the Ubuntu Code of Conduct v2.0.
• Optional (because it was added late): Debian project Code of Conduct.

Graduate

• Manoel Horta Ribeiro, 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
• Massa, F. G., & O’Mahony, S. 2021. Order from Chaos: How Networked Activists Self-Organize by Creating a Participation Architecture. Administrative Science Quarterly. doi:10.1177/00018392211008880.
• Schneider, Nathan. 2021. Admins, Mods, and Benevolent Dictators for Life: The Implicit Feudalism of Online Communities. New Media & Society.

Additional resources

• Aurora, Valerie and Gardiner, Mary. 2019. How to respond to code of conduct reports. Frameshift Consulting.
• Hampton, Rachelle. 2019. The black feminists who saw the alt-right coming. Slate.
• 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.

Week 7: Quality (02.16)

Lectures

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

Lecture recordings (panopto) and slides (canvas)

Assignments

Wikipedia Assignment (all)

• Articles revised and published in main namespace.
• Wikipedia assignment reflection essay due 2/18.

Undergraduate

• Benkler, Yochai. 2006. The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press. Ch. 2 excerpt (pp. 29-34) & Ch. 3 (all).
• 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

Graduate

• 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
• 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

Additional resources

• 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.
• 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 (02.23)

Lectures

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

Lecture recording (panopto) and slides (canvas)

Assignments

Undergraduate

• Mary Gray and Siddharth Suri. 2019. Ghost Work. Read Introduction, Chs 1, 3, and 6 (Other chapters and Conclusion optional). (Available via via Canvas or the Internet Archive)

Graduate

• 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

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.
• Shoshanna Zuboff. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

Week 9: AI (03.02)

Lectures

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

Lecture recordings (Panopto) and slides (canvas).

Assignments

Undergraduate

• 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.
• 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

Graduate

• Michael Ann DeVito. 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)

Week 10: The Future (03.09)

Lectures

1. The future of online communities & crowds

Assignments

Undergraduate

• Take-home exam (distributed 3/7, due 3/8)

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); Nathan TeBlunthuis (Northwestern), 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 and Jeremy Foote) as well as current participants. Some of the language and policies were co-authored with Daniel Immerwahr (Northwestern).