Cooperation Workshop

Time: Tuesdays, 4:15pm

Email List: Cooperation Workshop/Mailing list

Location: Berkman Conference Room at Harvard Law School (23 Everett Street, 2nd Floor)

The Cooperation Workshop group is a small, user-driven forum for discussing empirical research on cooperation. Several, but not all, of the participants are fellows at the Berkman Center.

Some weeks, we have seminar sessions which are public talks with an invited guests and will involve a presentation and a seminar discussion over about 75 minutes. They will be clearly marked below and advertised on a series of email lists.

Most of our sessions are workshop sessions where the basic model is that each week, one participant will distribute work for discussion and feedback from the group. Researchers are welcome to join these workshop sessions but we do ask two things of all the participants:

1. Each week some piece of writing will be shared with the group. This might be a draft of a paper, an extended abstracted or a description of a project, or a paper by someone outside of the group (e.g., a classic work) that provides important background. We expect everybody who joins the group to have 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 or twice.

If you want to get an idea of what we do, you can check out our previous sessions:

• Cooperation Workshop/Fall 2011 Sessions
• Cooperation Workshop/Spring 2012 Sessions

Also, you can check out a previous version of this group:

• Cooperation Seminar(2009-2012)

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
• Benjamin Mako Hill
• Brian Keegan
• Justin Reich
• Erhardt Graeff
• Judith Donath
• Heather Whitney
• Bodó Balázs
• Panagiotis Takis Metaxas
• Dalida María Benfield
• Matt Becker

Add yourself here if you are participating, or want to, but aren't on the list.

Sessions

Tuesday September 25, 2012

Our first meeting will be on Tuesday September 24, 2012. The agenda for the first meeting will be:

• Welcome back, introduction, reunions, and updates.
• Discussion of two recent literature reviews published on Wikipedia.
• Discussion and planning for future sessions, future speakers, etc.

The readings for this week are two recent literature reviews on Wikipedia:

• Taha Yasseri and János Kertész. 2012. “Value production in a collaborative environment.” arXiv:1208.5130
• Nicolas Jullien. 2012. “What We Know About Wikipedia: A Review of the Literature Analyzing the Project(s).” SSRN Electronic Journal.

Tuesday October 2, 2012 (Public Seminar Session)

In our first public seminar of the year, we're going to be hosting Haiyi Zhu from Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University who is going to talk about some of her research on shared leadership in Wikipedia.

The meeting will be at 16:15 at the Berkman Conference room at 23 Everett Street, 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA. The seminar will involve time for discussion and should end by 17:30.

The format will be a seminar presentation so there is no required reading this week.

Talk Abstract:

Traditional research on leadership in online communities has consistently focused on the small set of people occupying leadership roles. We use a model of shared leadership, which posits that leadership behaviors come from members at all levels, not simply from people in high-level leadership positions. Although every member can exhibit some leadership behavior, different types of leadership behavior performed by different types of leaders on different types of followers may not be equally effective. We investigate how distinct types of leadership behaviors (transactional, aversive, directive and person-focused) and the legitimacy of the people who deliver them (people in formal leadership positions or not) and the experience of the people who receive them (newcomers and experienced members) influence the contributions that the receivers make in the context of Wikipedia.

Biography:

Haiyi Zhu is a fourth year PhD student in Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. She is interested in how to manage people to achieve the common goal that transcends individual interest in an environment which lacks hierarchical structure and monetary incentives. Specifically, she has investigated shared leadership, group identification, goal settings and social modeling in the context of Wikipedia. One of her papers is nominated for best paper award in the 15th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. She got her bachelor degree in computer science from Tsinghua University in 2009.

Tuesday October, 9, 2012

Due do a little confusion due to scheduling, we're going to have a reading group session this week. We'll red this by paper:

Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest: Evidence from Mubarak’s Natural Experiment by Navid Hassanpour

It will very likely be a short session but hopefully we'll sepnd a few minutes to try to arrange the next few weeks.