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:

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.
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:

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

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.

Tuesday October 16, 2012

We will be discussing work by Balazs Bodo on piratical commons. The paper is Set the fox to watch the geese – voluntary IP regimes in piratical file-sharing communities which is available with the username/password sent to the list.

Here's the teaser:

[W] is a highly secretive, elitist file-sharing network that specializes in music. Born on the ruins of [O], it is rumored to have all the finest, most exquisite and most complete collection of music ever written, hummed or recorded. Entry is difficult. Hopeful candidates need to pass an interview to prove that they know the rules of the site and those of music piracy. Detailed preparation materials are available that discuss such notions as ‘lossy’ and ‘lossless’ compression techniques, bitrate, transcoding, and so on. The candidates need to be prepared on the community guidelines and site-specific etiquette as well.

The interviews are conducted on an IRC channel. When I felt prepared, I tried to join the channel. Instead of a merciless examiner, however, a sobering message greeted me:

“You were kicked from #[W]-invites by ZeroBot (Banned: Your entire country [Hungary] is banned from the invites channel. This is because of the very high proportion of users from this area being bad for the site - either leechers, traders, sellers and/or cheaters.)"

I laughed out loud. First YouTube, with its black, “This video is not available in your country” screens, and now the pirates also lock me out from their musical archives. They both seem to protect their respective resources from me, whom they perceive as a free-rider.

In terms of feedback, Bodo has said:

This is a book chapter coming out early next year in an anthology on piracy. I would like to turn this text into a full book, using this text as a core, exploring the different topics and questions raised here in more depth, including:

bottom up norm formation
information commons
online self-governance

As well as:

piracy as resistance
IP activism
norms and laws interaction
political economy of IP

And I guess there are a bunch of other field that could be included here.

My questions to the group would be the following:

is this a different case from wikipedia self governance, for example? why yes? why not?
how to make it acceptable to talk about piracy in a not clearly dismissing/condemning fashion?
which direction seems to you the most interesting/promising, the least written up?
what is the big picture this puzzle piece fits the most?
do you have stories to add?
how to make this case more than just a dispatch from a marginal place on the net?
how would you try to turn this argument into an agenda setting tool?
how to strengthen the argument? is it worth putting a quantitative stuff behind this, or the cultural anthropology account would suffice?
is this the way to bridge different discourses (legal, cultural studies, media studies, policy, etc)? If not, despite this being the goal, what to change to make it equally accessible for these different disciplines?
who should the text talk to (with this content and arguments)? to whom does it talk to now?

Tuesday November 20, 2012

Jérôme (tentative).