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:
- 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.
- 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
- Catalina Laserna
- 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:
- What makes some content more likely to be reused or remixed than others?
- 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:
- Present an experimental economist's toolkit for measuring social preferences.
- Reflect on the state of the experimental economics field and on how practicing it online can help push the discipline forward.
- 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:
- How collaborations about breaking news events are distinct from traditional articles
- How the role ecosystem within these collaboration are inhabited and re-create across time and collaborations
- 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:
- Don't Bite the Newbies by Aaron Halfaker, Aniket Kittur and John Riedl published in WikySym 2011
- 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:
- This article has been very inspirational in my work. (contextual)
- The report to the funders of the Onigaming project. (main reading)
- A somewhat dated statement of my intellectual interests and concerns. (contextual)
NO SESSION: November 24, 2011 (Thanksgiving)
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.
Session 11: December 8, 2011
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)
