Editing Cooperation Workshop/Fall 2012 Sessions

== Sessions ==
=== Tuesday September 25, 2012 ===

Our first meeting will be on Tuesday September 24, 2012. The agenda for the first meeting will be:

* Welcome back, introduction, reunions, and updates.
* Discussion of two recent literature reviews published on Wikipedia.
* Discussion and planning for future sessions, future speakers, etc.

The readings for this week are two recent literature reviews on Wikipedia:

* Taha Yasseri and János Kertész. 2012. [http://arxiv.org/abs/1208.5130 “Value production in a collaborative environment.”] arXiv:1208.5130
* Nicolas Jullien. 2012. [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2053597 “What We Know About Wikipedia: A Review of the Literature Analyzing the Project(s).”] SSRN Electronic Journal.


=== Tuesday October 2, 2012 (''Public Seminar Session'') ===

In our first public seminar of the year, we're going to be hosting [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~haiyiz/ Haiyi Zhu] from [http://www.hcii.cmu.edu/ Human Computer Interaction Institute] at [http://www.cmu.edu/ Carnegie Mellon University] who is going to talk about some of her research on shared leadership in Wikipedia.

The meeting will be at 16:15 at the Berkman Conference room at 23 Everett Street, 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA. The seminar will involve time for discussion and should end by 17:30.

The format will be a '''seminar presentation''' so there is no required reading this week.

Talk Abstract:

:Traditional research on leadership in online communities has consistently focused on the small set of people occupying leadership roles. We use a model of shared leadership, which posits that leadership behaviors come from members at all levels, not simply from people in high-level leadership positions. Although every member can exhibit some leadership behavior, different types of leadership behavior performed by different types of leaders on different types of followers may not be equally effective. We investigate how distinct types of leadership behaviors (transactional, aversive, directive and person-focused) and the legitimacy of the people who deliver them (people in formal leadership positions or not) and the experience of the people who receive them (newcomers and experienced members) influence the contributions that the receivers make in the context of Wikipedia.

Biography:

:Haiyi Zhu is a fourth year PhD student in Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is interested in how to manage people to achieve the common goal that transcends individual interest in an environment which lacks hierarchical structure and monetary incentives.  Specifically, she has investigated shared leadership, group identification, goal settings and social modeling in the context of Wikipedia. One of her papers is nominated for best paper award in the 15th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. She got her bachelor degree in computer science from Tsinghua University in 2009.


=== Tuesday October, 9, 2012 ===

Due do a little confusion due to scheduling, we're going to have a reading group session this week. We'll red this by paper:

:[http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1903351&download=yes Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest: Evidence from Mubarak’s Natural Experiment] by Navid Hassanpour

It will very likely be a short session but hopefully we'll sepnd a few minutes to try to arrange the next few weeks.


=== Tuesday October 16, 2012 ===

We will be discussing work by '''Balazs Bodo''' on piratical commons. The paper is [http://epicenter.media.mit.edu/~mako/cooperation/set_the_fox.pdf Set the fox to watch the geese – voluntary IP regimes in piratical file-sharing communities] which is available with the username/password sent to the list.

Here's the teaser:

:[W] is a highly secretive, elitist file-sharing network that specializes in music. Born on the ruins of [O], it is rumored to have all the finest, most exquisite and most complete collection of music ever written, hummed or recorded. Entry is difficult. Hopeful candidates need to pass an interview to prove that they know the rules of the site and those of music piracy. Detailed preparation materials are available that discuss such notions as ‘lossy’ and ‘lossless’ compression techniques, bitrate, transcoding, and so on. The candidates need to be prepared on the community guidelines and site-specific etiquette as well.

:The interviews are conducted on an IRC channel. When I felt prepared, I tried to join the channel. Instead of a merciless examiner, however, a sobering message greeted me:

::“You were kicked from #[W]-invites by ZeroBot (Banned: Your entire country [Hungary] is banned from the invites channel. This is because of the very high proportion of users from this area being bad for the site - either leechers, traders, sellers and/or cheaters.)"

:I laughed out loud. First YouTube, with its black, “This video is not available in your country” screens, and now the pirates also lock me out from their musical archives. They both seem to protect their respective resources from me, whom they perceive as a free-rider.

In terms of feedback, Bodo has said:

:This is a book chapter coming out early next year in an anthology on piracy. I would like to turn this text into a full book, using this text as a core, exploring the different topics and questions raised here in more depth, including:

:* bottom up norm formation
:* information commons
:* online self-governance

:As well as:

:* piracy as resistance
:* IP activism
:* norms and laws interaction
:* political economy of IP

:And I guess there are a bunch of other field that could be included here.

:My questions to the group would be the following:

:* is this a different case from wikipedia self governance, for example? why yes? why not?
:* how to make it acceptable to talk about piracy in a not clearly dismissing/condemning fashion?
:* which direction seems to you the most interesting/promising, the least written up?
:* what is the big picture this puzzle piece fits the most?
:* do you have stories to add?
:* how to make this case more than just a dispatch from a marginal place on the net?
:* how would you try to turn this argument into an agenda setting tool?
:* how to strengthen the argument? is it worth putting a quantitative stuff behind this, or the cultural anthropology account would suffice?
:* is this the way to bridge different discourses (legal, cultural studies, media studies, policy, etc)? If not, despite this being the goal, what to change to make it equally accessible for these different disciplines?
:* who should the text talk to (with this content and arguments)? to whom does it talk to now?

=== 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.



=== Tuesday October 30, 2012 ===

Ahmed Abdel Latif (http://ictsd.org/about/our-people/ahmed-abdel-latif/) will be talking about '''Global Knowledge Governance : Challenges and options for reform'''.

:'''Abstract:'''
:Knowledge plays a central role in empowering societies to address the multiple, political, economic and social challenges they face. With globalization, revolutions in communications and information technologies (ICT), and a myriad of scientific advances, knowledge has become an increasingly important factor in achieving innovation, growth and competitiveness and in sustaining cultural creativity. The ability of people to harness knowledge is, however, dependent on the structure of knowledge ownership. At present, intellectual property (IP) rules are the predominant tool for regulating the creation, diffusion and use of knowledge – and related goods and services. However, the unprecedented strengthening of IP rules in the past two decades has become a source of tensions. Aware that the contest over the scope and distribution of IP rights – and appropriate governance arrangements – is set to intensify, an independent Expert Taskforce on Global Knowledge Governance was established by the Oxford Global Economic Governance program to propose a set of principles and options for reform. It report is expected to be released in 2013.

:The taskforce’s work seeks to address the following questions: 
:*What are the most critical current and emerging global trends and challenges relating to knowledge generation, access and use? What are the issues that matter most to different kinds of stakeholders?
:*How effective are the current arrangements for global knowledge governance in facing these challenges? Are they adequate for responding to emerging trends and future challenges?
:*What are key principles that should guide reform of global knowledge governance and what are the options for reform?

:The work of the taskforce includes consultations; an online stakeholder survey; interviews with a diversity of academics, policy experts, and stakeholder communities around the world; and a review of the most relevant scholarly and policy literature.  The report will be peer-reviewed by a group of leading international scholars working on the intersection of issues covered in the study

=== Tuesday November 6, 2012 (Workshop Session) ===

We will meet to workshop a paper by Mayo Fuster Morell. Details are below:

'''Title:'''
:The Internet and the 15M Mobilizations in Spain: Continuities and disruptions from the Global Justice Movement

'''Abstract:'''
:This article provides an empirical analysis examining if and how the typology of adoption of ICTs could contribute to explain the continuities and disruptions of the organizational form of the mobilizations taking place in Spain since 15 of May 2011, in contrast to the one during the Global Justice Movement wave of mobilization early 2000s. The methodology is based on case studies, with interviews and participative observation, of the Barcelona acampada of 2011 as part of the 15M, and V European Social Forum as part of the Global Justice Movement. The analysis of the organizational form of the mobilization has considered a set of features: space, time, scope, and composition, and ultimate its impact in terms of scale of the mobilization, and ability to influence the public debate.

You can [http://epicenter.media.mit.edu/~mako/cooperation/MFM_15M_Internet_Cooperation.pdf download the paper] from our quasi-private repository. The username/password was sent to the mailing list. You can also email [[User:Mako|Mako]] for it.

=== Tuesday November 13, 2012 (Public Talk) ===

We will host a public talk on [http://www.wikidata.org/ Wikidata] by Denny Vrandečić.

'''Wikidata: The next step for Wikipedia (and beyond)'''

:'''Abstract'''
:Wikidata is a new Wikimedia project that will provide an infrastructure to store and access structured data for use in Wikipedia articles, similar to the way that Wikimedia Commons stores and provides public access to multimedia files today. To achieve this, Wikidata will become a knowledge base that anyone can edit. The talk will present the Wikidata data model and user interface design, the current state of the project, and aims to induce discussions on the topic of collaboration for collecting structured data by a broad and open audience: what do we need to do in order to provide a project that allows everyone to collect the sum of human knowledge in a structured way? 

:'''About the speaker'''
:[http://denny.vrandecic.de Denny Vrandečić] is project director of Wikidata with Wikimedia Deutschland, and has previously been at the AIFB group at KIT Karlsruhe, Germany, and at ISI at USC, Los Angeles, CA. He is co-inventor of Semantic MediaWiki, used by NASA, the CIA, Google, and many others, has advised Metaweb on their RDF export, and is founding admin of the Croatian Wikipedia.

==== Interested participants ====
''in addition to the weekly participants''
* [[user:sj|Sj]]
* One additional unnamed Wikipedian (tentative)

=== Tuesday November 20, 2012 (''Public talk'') ===

CANCELLED talk by Paul Girard] FOR ILLNESS 

Alternative session with small discussions of Charlie DeTar thesis work and Mayo Fuster Morell design of a Master in Internet, Innovation and Public Policies. 

'''Public talk''' - The Law Factory; or how to scientifically unpack the social processes that drive the making of the Law. 

[http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/en/team-en/paul-girard-en/ Paul Girard] - the technical coordinator of the [http://www.medialab.sciences-po.fr/index.php?page=home Sciences Po Medialab] in Paris - will be presenting Sciences Po's [http://www.thelawfactory.org Law Factory project] and is interested in getting feedback from our group. 

The project seeks to answer the question: "Who is actually making the Law?". The idea is to develop a tool inspired from Open Source Software's concurrent versions and Wikipedia's edit histories systems to keep track of who made which modifications to any proposed piece of Law.

In that context, the big questions that arise are:

(i) How to best technically develop the tool so that it would allow to conduct both qualitative and quantitative research on the collaboration processes that drive the making of the Law. One important issue is that respect is: how can we differentiate substantive modifications from those that are purely technical or formal?

(ii) How to develop the tool so that citizens can actually use it in the spirit of empowering civil society and increasing accountability?

:''A more thorough abstract is as follows:''

:The research project “The Law Factory” aims at using different software and informatics tools in order to question the generalized Parliament impotence corroborated by a number of case studies, namely from the legal and political science area.

:By systematically exploiting large public databases related to parliamentary activities, in fact, these instruments offer an unique resource of visualization, understanding and analysis of parliamentary debates. The project includes a focus on those areas of legislation that have been changed as a result of parliamentary amendments. It aims at offering one intelligent visualization that allows quantitative but also qualitative analysis of parliamentary activity. This instrument is intended for both the academic community and the large public. The aim is first, to deepen the knowledge about contents and procedures of parliamentary activities, and secondly, to enable citizens to use the data on this issue.

:The scope of this project is to contribute to the larger debate on the quality of our democracy and its future, starting from a reflection on the mechanisms that characterize representative institutions.

:For this purpose, a collaboration between citizens and researchers seeking to produce new type of data on the functioning of parliamentary democracy was established. More precisely, the question that guides our research is: «to what extend the parliamentary phase modifies the law?”. In other words, what is the specific impact of the Parliament as an institution on laws?

:Observing the evolution of a bill from its original version to the official promulgation will allow us to identify those areas of text that have been modified through amendments. By describing the substantive or cosmetic nature of these amendments and by identifying their authors and the associated debated, we seek to develop data allowing us to study the extent to which Parliament is concretely involved in the law making process.

=== Tuesday November 27, 2012 (Workshop) ===

Matt Becker will present his work concerning a solution to the problems posed by Terms of Use, EULAs, and other adhesive standard form contracts, which draws on peer production principles and the recent experiments of the Wikimedia Foundation and Facebook.

The reading for the week is [http://epicenter.media.mit.edu/~mako/cooperation/mbecker-peer_produced_tou.pdf Peer Produced Terms of Use]. The conversation will start assuming that you've read it. (Username/password are on the list.)

A brief summary of his work:

:Terms of Use (TOUs) are a particularly common example of the larger legal phenomena of "adhesive standard form contracts," contracts that consumers are made to agree to on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.  Legal scholars and consumer advocates have denounced these types of contracts for nearly a century because they are often onerous and unfair, and do not comport with our idea of what a contract should be.  Yet we continue to allow them because they are very efficient, and perhaps necessary in our mass-consumer world.  Because of these concerns, the legal system has developed a number of doctrinal approaches that undermine the efficacy of these contracts, with the result being that there is a great deal of uncertainty for businesses as to whether their TOUs will actually be enforceable in court.  Thus, the state of the law regarding TOUs and other adhesive contracts is actually problematic for both consumers and businesses.

:Recently, the experiments of two of the largest Internet entities, Wikimedia and Facebook, suggest a novel opportunity to rein in the excesses of TOUs while also improving their enforceability, making them more fair for consumers and more reliable for businesses.  By creating an online forum to allow businesses to release draft versions of their TOUs for review by their users, and then working with these users to construct a better-worded, more fair TOU, these businesses take advantage of the fruits of the peer production process while also giving users a voice in what could be described as a form of decentralized collective bargaining.  Beyond the immediate effects of improving the TOU, this process has positive consumer relations implications, and also positive legal implications, creating a more robust contract.

Matt is interested in any and all feedback, in particular the following:

# Does this idea seem feasible, and do you have particular concerns you would like to see addressed?
# How could we encourage the growth of a "peer produced TOU" community, and what pitfalls should we look out for?  Are there important aspects of successful wiki models that should be taken note of?

=== Tuesday December 4, 2012 ===

'''Dwarfs without giants. Decentralized architecture and Internet-based services'''
Francesca Musiani '''(Public workshop)'''

This talk is aimed at discussing some of my recently-concluded PhD work in socio-economics of innovation, on decentralized network architectures and Internet-based services. This was the dissertation's '''abstract''':
''Even if the concept of decentralization is embedded to some extent at the very core of the Internet, today’s “network of networks” integrates this principle only partially. The dominant organizational model for Internet-based services involves large clusters of servers controlled by the "giants" of the IT sector. The search for alternatives is in progress, aiming at different ways to achieve effectiveness and sustainability. In this quest, a number of developers look back to the evergreen qualities of a relatively old technology, peer-to-peer (P2P), that leverages the socio-technical resources of the network's "dwarfs" - its periphery or “edge” - in a way that is, in fact, closer to the pre-commercial Internet.''
''This dissertation explores the distributed and decentralized approach to the technical architecture of Internet-based services. It illustrates the co-shaping of a decentralized network architecture and of several different dynamics: the articulation between actors and contents, the allocation of responsibilities and the capacity to exert control, the organization of the market, the forms of existence and role of entities such as the nodes of a network, its users, its central or coordinating units. This work analyses the conditions under which a network that structures itself according to a non-hierarchical or hybrid model, and delegates the responsibility of its functioning to its edge, can develop and thrive in today's Internet. The dissertation follows the developers of three Internet services - a search engine, a storage service and a video streaming application - built on primarily decentralized network models; it also follows the collectives of pioneer users developing with these services, and selectively, the political venues where the Internet's medium- and long-term organization and governance are discussed.''

'''About me''': I'm currently the Yahoo! Fellow-in-Residence in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Washington, DC, and a Berkman affiliate. Everything the Berkman website says of me (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/fmusiani) is still true, except that I've now defended my PhD (about a month ago) :)

=== Tuesday December 11, 2012 ===

Outline of paper on developing/implementing/analyzing real-time data streams such as Twitter activity during debates. Brian & Drew.