Mitchell Centre Seminar Series
| Dates: | 27 November 2019 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Jürgen Lerner, University of Konstanz
How to get work done online: network analysis of open peer-production
Recent decades have witnessed the emergence of open peer-production in which voluntary participants contribute time and effort to create public goods. Successful examples include open source software, like the Linux operating system, or the user-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia. At its beginning, self-organizing large-scale collaboration seemed puzzling: why should anyone participate in the absence of direct monetary rewards, how do teams coordinate and control work in the near-absence of any predefined organizational structure, and which factors explain product quality. In this talk we claim that such questions can be tackled by analyzing networks of task-oriented interaction among participants. Using large scale data from Wikipedia, we demonstrate that the structure of dispute-resolution networks can explain article quality and that network effects shape participants' decisions to contribute to specific projects.
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G6
Humanities Bridgeford Street
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