Editing Cooperation Workshop/Fall 2012 Sessions (section)

=== Tuesday October 23, 2012 ===

[[User:Mako|Benjamin Mako Hill]] will give a practice job talk:

'''Failures of Collective Action: New Evidence from Peer Production'''

:'''Abstract'''
:Although new communication technologies have opened the door to large scale collaborative production — like Wikipedia and Linux — they have also created digital records that bring previously invisible failures of collective action into view. I will suggest that this shift has offered scholars of communication a new opportunity to understand fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications — like the decision to join a community or contribute to a public good. I will present research that seeks to answer why some attempts at collaborative production online build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. In particular, I will look at how incentive design in communication technologies shapes volunteer contributions.  Using large datasets from the Scratch online community and Wikipedia, I will present new evidence that widespread incentives to collective action introduce persistent trade-offs between more contributions and high quality contributions from a range of participants.