Pathways to Community Success

This page documents work related to the NSF Cyber-Human Systems award Pathways to Community Success: Advancing a Comparative Science of Online Collaborative Organization (IIS-1617129, IIS-1617468). In particular, the work seeks to understand the factors that encourage success in computer-supported peer production—the form of online collaborative organization used to create public information goods like Wikipedia and Linux. In particular, the work seeks to use longitudinal comparative analysis of populations of peer production communities to elaborate a pathways to effective collaborative organization by exploring three central facets of peer production:

the relationship between participation equality and growth;
the extent to which community effectiveness is limited by competition for volunteer resources;
the role of social interaction and coordination in productive collaboration.

Although the work has drawn from a range of empirical settings, much of the core of the empirical project has involved drawing from wikis hosted by Fandom/Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation. The project has supported a big part of the core of the work of the CDSC over the first few years of its life.

Presentations

[Peer-reviews Conference Presentation] TeBlunthuis, Nathan E.; Shaw, Aaron; Mako Hill, Benjamin. “The Population Ecology of Online Collective Action.” International Conference on Computational Social Science (IC2S2 2020), Cambridge, MA, (Virtual Conference), July 19, 2020.
[Peer-reviews Conference Presentation] TeBlunthuis, Nathan E.; Shaw, Aaron; Hill, Benjamin Mako. “The Population Ecology of Online Collective Action.” ACM Conference on Collective Intelligence (CI 2020), Boston, MA, (Virtual Conference), June 18, 2020.
[Peer-reviews Conference Presentation] Hwang, Sohyeon; Shaw, Aaron. “Heterogeneous practices in collective governance.” ACM Conference on Collective Intelligence (CI 2020), Boston, MA, (Virtual Conference), June 18, 2020.

Links and Resources

Public project summary on the NSF website (Page for NU; Page for UW)
Project description and references included in the original NSF application

People

Jeremy Foote (Northwestern; Purdue)
Benjamin Mako Hill (UW) [PI]
Charles Kiene (UW)
Aaron Shaw (Northwestern) [PI]
Nathan TeBlunthuis (UW)

Biographies of everyone working on the award on the People page in this wiki.

Funding and Disclaimer

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number IIS-1908850.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.