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 distribute work for discussion and feedback from 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

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

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

Session canceled due to room space unavailability and many of the participants unable to come.

Session 8: November 10, 2011

This week we'll be reading two papers:

1. Don't Bite the Newbies by Aaron Halfaker, Aniket Kittur and John Riedl published in WikySym 2011
2. Swayed by Friends or by the Crowd? by Zeinab Abbassi, Christina Aperjis, and Bernardo A. Huberman.

Session 9: November 17, 2011

Three items this week are from Catalina:

1. This article has been very inspirational in my work. (contextual)
2. The report to the funders of the Onigaming project. (main reading)
3. A somewhat dated statement of my intellectual interests and concerns. (contextual)

Also, Catalina posted the following questions to the email list:

1. In what ways is an analysis at two levels, i.e., the "socio-cognitive dynamics" and the "technological dynamics" sufficient to capture the contrast between doing inquiry in a cybercy environment like Knowledge Forum versus a classroom that only uses non-digital media? What could be improved? (See the Scardemalia reading and her Toronto based organization IKIT) Since I used Knowledge Forum for a number of years in my own teaching at Harvard I will bring a vivid example.
2. In what ways does an "ethnographic stance" enable researchers to work under conditions of cultural discontinuity? I will provide examples of the kinds of "teaching for Understanding- Anishinabee style" units developed by the Onigaming teachers. See the report to funders prepared by my former student and co-researcher Brian King. For more context on the professional development program we implemented see Harvard's WIDE and ALPS websites. For non-educators, note this work comes from Howard Gardner's Project Zero.)
3. In what ways did the strategy of fostering "a community of intentional innovators" advance a collective openness towards innovation at Onigaming? (see the report to funders)
4. What aspects of "cybercy" are apparent in the Onigaming case? (See my piece on "Encounters with cybercy and the Trojan Mouse.")

Session 10: December 1, 2011

Dariusz!

Trust & credibility on Wikipedia (the Essjay case)

Session 11: December 8, 2011

Berkman conference room space may not be available.

Goal of the session – 8th December 2011 Title: Participation in collaborative communities: Main organizational principles. Is there central roles? Is there dependencies between the several forms and degrees of participation?

In previous session (concretely in the Nov 10) emerged the discussion if there is and which would be the "central" forms of participation in common based peer production / collaborative communities. Could we point to a specific profile of contributions as the central ones? Would be the key contributors the one with higher number of editors or the ones contributing more content independently of the number of "edits"?. Mako was pointing that according to previous research on Wikipedia (which was the reference?) there is a profile of participation in Wikipedia that is characterized by few contributions (in number of edits) but contributing the main base of the content of an article. However, the profile of contributors generally most valuated (by the community and/or researchers) are the one with higher number of edits. With the concept of "participation as an ecosystem" Mayo tried to "break" the search of key type of contributions and try to point out that it is the ability to combine and create an ecosystem logic between different types and degrees of participation in collaborative communities what is key in terms of allowing the collaborative communities scale in participation. In this regard, the driven question would not be, which is the key contribution, but which is the role of each profile of participation (strong, weak and “non” contributors; contributors on content, contributions organizing events, contributions doing research etc.) and if and how they would reinforce each other and benefit the process. This section will consist first in a brainstorming by each attendee of which would be in her or his view the three main characteristics of participation in CBPP (reinforcing or in contrast to the 10 presented in the reading); to then argue around the question if there is some distinctive forms of participation (in typology and in degree of involvement), if between them it could be distinguish a key form of participation - central for the process, or/and if it could be identify an ecosystem perspective of different forms each playing an role and reinforcing each other.

The suggested readings is a Chapter of Mayo Fuster Morell thesis. FUSTER MORELL, Mayo (2010). Chapter VI: Participation in online creation communities’ platforms. Governance of online creation communities. Provision of platforms for participation for the building of digital commons, (Unpublished dissertation), Department Social and Political Science, European University Institute, Florence.

• Short reading: Read only section “b) Participation is possible in multiple forms and to different degrees” (Pag. 6-12) and “VI. II. Conclusions” (Pag. 25-29).
• Long reading: Read complete Chapter.

Additionally, you can find the bibliography of the thesis if you want to consult bibliographic references.

Apart of the value of addressing these questions for the Cooperation group members, the session will be useful for Mayo in order to review the Chapter which might be published as part of a book containing her whole thesis or as an article. In this regard, any suggestion for improvement would be must appreciated by Mayo.

Finally, the session will also consist of a collective sharing of a cake to celebrate Mayo & Mako's birthday.

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).
• Dariusz: A paper on Essjay case - why Wikipedia rejects credentials verification (December/January)
• Dariusz: A paper on why conflict results in better articles on Wikipedia (December/January)
• Catalina: Paper on Harvard College courses go online (November 17)

Papers and Proceedings to read

• "On the economics and biology of Trust" - E. Fehr