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
• Aaron Shaw
• Benjamin Mako Hill
• Mayo Fuster Morell
• Dennis Y. Tenen
• Andrés Monroy-Hernández
• Jérôme Hergueux
• Brian Keegan
• Justin Reich
• Jennifer Shkabatur

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 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 how:

1. Collaborations about breaking news events are distinct from traditional articles
2. The ecosystem of roles within these collaboration which users inhabit and re-create across time and collaborations
3. Better design wikis or other open collaboration systems to support high-tempo knowledge work.

Readings:

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

Attendance: Mayo from the ceiling.

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).