Ecology of Online Communities

This page documents work related to the NSF Cyber-Human Systems award Modeling the Ecological Dynamics of Online Organizations (IIS-1910202, IIS-1908850). The overarching goal of this work is to understand ecological dynamics between online communities. Our concept of ecological dynamics is taken from ecological science in biology and from research in organizational and community ecology in organizational sociology and communication. The grant proposal elaborates a series of quantitative projects that will by-and-large test whether general findings from biology and organizational studies will apply to online communities. But there are also lots of reasons (and some empirical results) that suggest that the story won't be so simple. So we're also interested in considering qualitative projects that will help us to anticipate and explain findings from the quantitative studies. This might mean understanding how relationships between related communities are experienced and mediated.

Three time series of three different online communities that are all engaged in discussion of Harry Potter. It is clear that activity in all three is closely related and seems to be driven by things like releases of movies and books. Our work will seek to dynamics of these kinds of relationships in detail.

Presentations

• [Peer-reviewed 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-reviewed 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-reviewed 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
• Project management wiki page (Internal)
• A number of us tend to hang out in the #communitydata-ecology channel on OFTC (irc.oftc.net). For more, see our page on IRC.
• Meeting Notes

Research in progress

• Exposure and Participation Processes in Online Communities
• Participation Pathways
• Fediverse research

People

• Ellie Coleman (Northwestern)
• Jeremy Foote (Purdue)
• Benjamin Mako Hill (UW) [PI]
• Sohyeon Hwang (Northwestern)
• 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 numbers IIS-1910202 and 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.