Cooperation Workshop

Time: Thursdays 16:00-17:30 (Boston Time)

Email: Cooperation Workshop/Mailing list

Location: Berkman Conference Room / 23 Everett Street / Second Floor / Cambridge

The Cooperation Workshop group is a small, user-driven forum for discussing early-stage cooperation research. Several, but not all, of the participants are Berkman Fellows. Each week, one participant will presents work for discussion and feedback for the group.

Other researchers are welcome to join but we do ask two things of any participants:

1. Each week some contextual writing will be shared with the around. This might be a draft of a paper, an extended abstracted or a description of a project, a paper (perhaps by another author) that provides important background. We expect everybody who joins the group to have done read this material in advance.
2. We ask that participants, especially those that wish to present, to become regular participants and not just come once.

Accessing Documents

Some of the documents below are password protected. The password is in the mailing list archives. If you need access, you can mail mako@mit.edu for the username and password.

If you want to place documents in the password protected folder to share them with others, email them to mako@mit.edu.

Participants

• Yochai Benkler
• Mayo Fuster Morell
• Jérôme Hergueux
• Brian Keegan
• Benjamin Mako Hill
• Andrés Monroy-Hernández
• Justin Reich
• Aaron Shaw
• Jennifer Shkabatur
• Dennis Y. Tenen
• P. Takis Metaxas
• Dariusz Jemielniak

Add yourself here if you are participating, or want to, but aren't on the list.

Fall 2011 Schedule

Session 1: September 22, 2011

Because we had an early meeting, we will simply have a reading group for the following paper related to the social impact of decreased communication costs brought about by new technology:

• Dittmar, Jeremiah E. 2011. “Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of The Printing Press.” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 126(3):1133 -1172. Retrieved October 5, 2011. [1]

Session 2: September 29, 2011

From Aaron:

I'll be talking about some work I've been doing independently as well as in collaboration with Mako and Yochai.

The four page "Project Memo" summarizes where I think we're going with this and how it fits into my personal research agenda. The much longer "Gatekeeping Online" piece is a paper I've been revising and resubmitting lately that should help to frame/illustrate the current state of my thinking on these topics in a more detailed way. For the purposes of our discussion, it is important that you read the short memo.

FWIW, one slightly esoteric theory that frames much of this work is Robert Michels' (1915) "Iron Law of Oligarchy." If you want to know more about it, you can download a copy of the book from the Internet Archive.

• Four page "Project Memo" (Core reading)
• Draft Paper on Daily Kos (Contextual)
• Michels on the Iron Law (Contextual)

Session 3: October 6, 2011

Andrés Monroy-Hernández will present an idea for a paper, perhaps for a special issue of JCMC on participatory websites and user-generated content.

The goal is to explore these two questions:

1. What makes some content more likely to be reused or remixed than others?
2. When content is remixed, how original are those remixes? What leads to more originality?

Readings include:

• Rough attempt at a summary/extended abstract (Core reading)
• Paper on a methodology that might be used for answering question 2. (Contextual)

Session 4: October 13, 2011

Jerome: how (and why) do social preferences appear and evolve at the community level? The promises of behavioral experiments within online communities of practice.

Goals of the session:

1. Present an experimental economist's toolkit for measuring social preferences.
2. Reflect on the state of the experimental economics field and on how practicing it online can help push the discipline forward.
3. Brainstorm on which online communities of practice would be most suitable for testing hypothesis about the acquisition and evolution of social preferences.

Readings:

• The Trust research project on Wikipedia (core: illustrates the methodology and possible research questions)
• The Weirdest people in the World? (contextual: about the current state of the experimental economics field)

Attendance: Mayo

Session 5: October 20, 2011

Brian Keegan will present some recent findings and on-going dissertation research about the structures, dynamics, and practices particular to Wikipedia's coverage of breaking news events. The goal is to explore questions related to:

1. How collaborations about breaking news events are distinct from traditional articles
2. How the role ecosystem within these collaboration are inhabited and re-create across time and collaborations
3. How to better design wikis or other open collaboration systems to support high-tempo knowledge work.

Readings (read one, skim the others):

• Description of Japanese earthquake
• Differences between breaking and non-breaking articles
• Statistical & theoretical elaboration under review

Attendance: Mayo from the ceiling.

Session 6: October 27, 2011

The cooperation group will be a reading group this week reading two papers. Neither paper is long and the second is very short.

• Cheshire, Coye. 2011. “Online Trust, Trustworthiness, or Assurance?” Daedalus 140(4):49-58. (Daedalus | PDF)
• Rockenbach, Bettina, and Manfred Milinski. 2011. “To qualify as a social partner, humans hide severe punishment, although their observed cooperativeness is decisive.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. (PNAS | PDF)

Session 7: November 3, 2011

Berkman conference room space may not be available.

Session 10: December 1, 2011

Jerome (tentative): TBA

Session 11: December 8, 2011

Berkman conference room space may not be available.

Session 12: December 15, 2011

Berkman conference room space may not be available.

Proposed Sessions

• Mako: Almost Wikipedia paper on attempts at mobilization on online collaborative encyclopedia projects to discuss paper before I send it off. (Sometime in November/December)
• Yochai/Mako/Aaron: Barnstar paper.
• Mayo: Conceptualization and operationalization of governance models, scale of participation and complexity of collaboration: Lessons learned and further development (Sometime in the second term)
• Mayo: How to and does make sense to research the dimension/extension of common-based peer production on the web?. (Sometime in the second term).

Papers and Proceedings to read

• WikySym 2011 proceedings
  • "Don't Bite the Newbies" [2]