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.

Previous seminars (2009-2010) of Cooperation group: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/research/cooperation/seminar

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 9, 2012

Dennis Tenen suggested the following texts which are relevant to his work and which will be helpful in framing work he'll be presenting at some point in the next few weeks:

1. "What is Stylistics and Why are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?", by Stanley Fish
2. "How to Recognize a Poem when You See One," by Stanley Fish [1]

Both Stanley fish pieces are from his book on the authority of interpretive communities. The two articles drove textual analysis underground for many decades. If you don't have time to read both, read the second only.

Finally, it was suggested that we glance through:

Suárez, Juan Luis, Shiddarta Vásquez, and Fernando Sancho-Caparrini. “The Potosí Principle: Religious Prosociality Fosters Self-organization of Larger Communities Under Extreme Natural and Economic Conditions.” Literary and Linguistic Computing (December 8, 2011). [2]

Think about how the above stands up to Fish's objections. This is good background for my work, which I hope to present soon to the group (last week of this month would be good, probably). Best,

Session: February 16, 2012

Jerome will be leading a session on work on SourceForge and suggests:

This week, I would like to brainstorm with the group on how to leverage SourceForge.net data to construct meaningful indicators of activity at the developer level and success (or alt. "team spirit") at the project level. The goal is to relate those indicators to the individual and team level results of a behavioral experiment that we ran among SourceForge developers, in order to see if we can shed new lights on the individual and collective social processes that drive OSS contributions and explain successes and failures.

I would like to share the following 6 pages memo with the group as a basis for the discussion. It briefly explains the data that we already collected and the indicators that we already constructed. The memo then basically functions as a brief menu of suggestions for collecting additional data and constructing alternative indicators, as per my reading of the existing literature in Computer and Information sciences. I hope that the spirit of what we are trying to achieve with this study is most efficiently conveyed through actual proposals intended at constructing new indicators from the available SourceForge data, and that it will also lead to other ideas for collecting and organizing the available data in a novel and useful way.

I'm really exited about this study, and look forward to an illuminating discussion that will set the stage of our empirical strategy for this paper! :)

The memo is available on the cooperation mailing list.

Session: February 23, 2012

Wikipedia and emotions

Readings (passport protected - the usual one):

• Paper: Emotions and dialogue in a peer-production community: the case of Wikipedia by David Laniado, Carlos Castillo, Andreas Kaltenbrunner and Mayo Fuster-Morell
• Feedback from reviewers from WWW2012

The paper is going to be submitted to Wikisym 2012.

The discussion will be also followed (though phone connections) by the other two paper authors (from Barcelona media and Yahoo! Labs Barcelona) David Laniado and Andreas Kaltenbrunne.

Session: March 1, 2012

Benjamin Mako Hill presents a paper on Scratch: Causal Effects of a Reputation-Based Incentive in an Peer Production Community.

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)

Session: March 22, 2012

Outside reading: Wiki surveys: Open and quantifiable social data collection by Matthew J. Salganik and Karen E. C. Levy

Session: March 29, 2012

Draft Paper by Benjamin Mako Hill and Andrés Monroy-Hernández with the working title: The Remixer's Dilemma: The Tension Between Generativity and Originality [PDF is sent to the mailing list]

Session: April 12, 2012

Jerome. Collecting social roles and activity data about Wikipedia contributors. Very likely that I will postpone this session to sometime in May. So I'm happy to leave this slot free or share it if someone has something that he would like to present to the group!

Session: April 19, 2012

Cancelled

Session: April 26, 2012

Dariusz and Andreea, details to TBA/TBC

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