Cooperation Workshop

Time: Thursdays 16:30-18 (Boston Time)

Email: Cooperation Workshop/Mailing list

Location: TBC during Spring Semester.

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.

Winter/Spring 2012 Schedule

Session: February 2, 2012

Andres will lead a discussion about a draft paper on: “Narcotweets”: Social Media in Wartime.

This week I'd like to get feedback on this 8-page paper (emailed). I submitted it to a conference called ICWSM. A few things I'd like to discuss:

a) What are the small tweaks I can do to make it a stronger

contribution for a different venue (in case it gets rejected)? I'm thinking First Monday as a possible venue, mainly because I want to get this out _fast_ as a descriptive introduction to the topic and then focus on something more specific. There's lots of data to analyze, what are the most useful bits that are missing that would make it more compelling. What literature should I be referencing that I am not?

b) For the next paper on the topic, we'd like to explore some of the

following questions. Using this case what can we say about...

1. does social media give power to the people against bad governments?
2. does transparency and publicity help society be more democratic?
3. does greater information access help reduce fear?

How can these questions be framed in the context of existing lit? What

are good ways of operationalizing them?

Session: February 23, 2012

First half a session:

Wikipedia and emotions

Readings (passport protected - the usual one):

+ Paper: Emotions and dialogue in a peer-production community: the case of Wikipedia AUTHORS: David Laniado, Carlos Castillo, Andreas Kaltenbrunner and Mayo Fuster-Morell http://epicenter.media.mit.edu/~mako/cooperation/mayo-emowiki.pdf

+ Feedback from reviewers from WWW2012 http://epicenter.media.mit.edu/~mako/cooperation/mayo-emowiki-feedback.pdf

Paper to be submitted to Wikisym 2012 http://www.wikisym.org/

Session: March 8, 2012

Mayo Fuster Morell:

FIRTS PART:

+ Article: How does governance shape communities in term of scale of participation and complexity of collaboration acchived?: Insights to questions Iron Law.

SECOND PART:

+ Rethinking a research design to approuch the evolution of commons based peer production. How to and does make sense to research the dimension/extension of common-based peer production on the web? How to monitor its evolution?

Cake to celebrate international worker women day.

Session: March 15, 2012

Spring break (University Holiday)

Previous Sessions

• Cooperation Workshop/Fall 2011 Sessions

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.

• Andreea/Dariusz: Let's agree to disagree: why conflict results in better articles on Wikipedia (December/January).

• Group transversal session (initially proposed by Mayo, but aiming to be collectively conceptualize):

First part - "Rethinking the phenomenon/field analysis": i) Rethinking the (pros and contras) of the diverse concepts we use and are present in the literature to refer to the phenomenon of study (common-based peer production/open creation communities/open collaborative communities/online creation communities/peer production etc.)? ii) Rethinking the "field: Is there a "field" of research on CBPP? Which would be the stage of it? How the analyses and the research stage has evolved over time and which seems to be its potential developments?

Second part - "Rethinking the group": iii) Going though the shared or/and transversal reflections that had emerged in previous sessions: Do we share a common conception of the phenomenon (even if approaching it from diverse perspectives and methodological tools)? iv) Rethinking opportunities and possible further developments: Richness of the group and potentialities of the group? Do we (as a group or some of us) share goals for future developments?

Suggested for February 16 or 23.

• Howard Rheingold readings on social cooperation

Proposed papers and Proceedings to read

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

Cooperation group info @ Berkman web update

Preparing Cooperation web update