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 October 23, 2012

Benjamin Mako Hill will give a practice job talk:

Failures of Collective Action: New Evidence from Peer Production

Abstract

Although new communication technologies have opened the door to large scale collaborative production — like Wikipedia and Linux — they have also created digital records that bring previously invisible failures of collective action into view. I will suggest that this shift has offered scholars of communication a new opportunity to understand fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications — like the decision to join a community or contribute to a public good. I will present research that seeks to answer why some attempts at collaborative production online build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. In particular, I will look at how incentive design in communication technologies shapes volunteer contributions. Using large datasets from the Scratch online community and Wikipedia, I will present new evidence that widespread incentives to collective action introduce persistent trade-offs between more contributions and high quality contributions from a range of participants.

Tuesday October 30, 2012

Ahmed Abdel Latif (http://ictsd.org/about/our-people/ahmed-abdel-latif/) will be talking about Global Knowledge Governance : Challenges and options for reform.

Abstract:

Knowledge plays a central role in empowering societies to address the multiple, political, economic and social challenges they face. With globalization, revolutions in communications and information technologies (ICT), and a myriad of scientific advances, knowledge has become an increasingly important factor in achieving innovation, growth and competitiveness and in sustaining cultural creativity. The ability of people to harness knowledge is, however, dependent on the structure of knowledge ownership. At present, intellectual property (IP) rules are the predominant tool for regulating the creation, diffusion and use of knowledge – and related goods and services. However, the unprecedented strengthening of IP rules in the past two decades has become a source of tensions. Aware that the contest over the scope and distribution of IP rights – and appropriate governance arrangements – is set to intensify, an independent Expert Taskforce on Global Knowledge Governance was established by the Oxford Global Economic Governance program to propose a set of principles and options for reform. It report is expected to be released in 2013.

The taskforce’s work seeks to address the following questions:

What are the most critical current and emerging global trends and challenges relating to knowledge generation, access and use? What are the issues that matter most to different kinds of stakeholders?
How effective are the current arrangements for global knowledge governance in facing these challenges? Are they adequate for responding to emerging trends and future challenges?
What are key principles that should guide reform of global knowledge governance and what are the options for reform?

The work of the taskforce includes consultations; an online stakeholder survey; interviews with a diversity of academics, policy experts, and stakeholder communities around the world; and a review of the most relevant scholarly and policy literature. The report will be peer-reviewed by a group of leading international scholars working on the intersection of issues covered in the study

Tuesday November 6, 2012 (Workshop Session)

We will meet to workshop a paper by Mayo Fuster Morell. Details are below:

Title:

The Internet and the 15M Mobilizations in Spain: Continuities and disruptions from the Global Justice Movement

Abstract:

This article provides an empirical analysis examining if and how the typology of adoption of ICTs could contribute to explain the continuities and disruptions of the organizational form of the mobilizations taking place in Spain since 15 of May 2011, in contrast to the one during the Global Justice Movement wave of mobilization early 2000s. The methodology is based on case studies, with interviews and participative observation, of the Barcelona acampada of 2011 as part of the 15M, and V European Social Forum as part of the Global Justice Movement. The analysis of the organizational form of the mobilization has considered a set of features: space, time, scope, and composition, and ultimate its impact in terms of scale of the mobilization, and ability to influence the public debate.

You can download the paper from our quasi-private repository. The username/password was sent to the mailing list. You can also email Mako for it.

Tuesday November 13, 2012 (Public Talk)

We will host a public talk on Wikidata by Denny Vrandečić.

Wikidata: The next step for Wikipedia (and beyond)

Abstract

Wikidata is a new Wikimedia project that will provide an infrastructure to store and access structured data for use in Wikipedia articles, similar to the way that Wikimedia Commons stores and provides public access to multimedia files today. To achieve this, Wikidata will become a knowledge base that anyone can edit. The talk will present the Wikidata data model and user interface design, the current state of the project, and aims to induce discussions on the topic of collaboration for collecting structured data by a broad and open audience: what do we need to do in order to provide a project that allows everyone to collect the sum of human knowledge in a structured way?

About the speaker

Denny Vrandečić is project director of Wikidata with Wikimedia Deutschland, and has previously been at the AIFB group at KIT Karlsruhe, Germany, and at ISI at USC, Los Angeles, CA. He is co-inventor of Semantic MediaWiki, used by NASA, the CIA, Google, and many others, has advised Metaweb on their RDF export, and is founding admin of the Croatian Wikipedia.

Interested participants

in addition to the weekly participants

Sj
One additional unnamed Wikipedian (tentative)

Tuesday November 20, 2012

Jérôme (tentative).

Tuesday November 27, 2012

Tuesday December 4, 2012

Francesca Musiani (Yahoo! fellow @ Georgetown University, Berkman affiliate) I'd like to discuss some of my recently-concluded PhD work on decentralized network architectures and Internet-based services (also in view of some happy and somewhat unforeseen English-speaking publication possibilities that recently came up). Confirmed! I'll be putting on the wiki somewhat of a more detailed abstract - and perhaps share a paper - a couple of weeks before the seminar. Public workshop.

Dis-organized Tech - Talk by Adam White of Groupshot [www.groupshot.org] The massive expansion of mobile phones and ICT access in the developing world has led to a growing list of technology start-ups and ICT based NGO projects. From platforms like M-Pesa which enables for mobile money transfers to mobile phone based education, technology is changing how people coordinate and organize. These projects work to engage disconnected or poor communities, many in the informal economy or living in places beyond traditional regulation. Functioning in the spectrum of the informal though it is important that these technologies understand the DNA of their hosts. How can we create technology for informality: technology that is just disorganized enough to operate in, improve, and evolve the informal sector? Ruha Devanesan is organizing Adam White's attendance so if Francesca ends up confirming for this date, we can try and have Adam come in a different day.

Tuesday December 11, 2012

Outline of paper on developing/implementing/analyzing real-time data streams such as Twitter activity during debates. Brian & Drew.