It usually takes me a couple recommendations of a book before I finally pick it up, although to be honest if the title is catchy and the cover is pretty, sometimes all it takes is an Amazon recommendation.  In the case of Here Comes Everybody, I heard Clay Shirky give a keynote address at CSCW in March telling some of the stories from the book, then recently at the annual Academy of Management conference I heard another person reference this book as having pulled ideas from it for their research paper, and finally I decided to pick it up.

When reading quantitative research papers on the subject of crowdsourcing, open source software, and online communities, you don’t quite get the feel of the personal stories behind the projects and successes in these organizations.  Clay’s work does a great job of pulling out personal stories, from a blogger who covered a military coup when traditional outlets were shut down, to someone retrieving a stolen phone by assembling an angry mob of supporters online, to (of course) Wikipedia, and the founding story that is frequently repeated of the failure of Nupedia.  Shirky does a great job of comparing this shift in technology to similar past shifts, such as the “layoffs” among the scribes when the printing press was created, or the pushback against calculators when they began to arrive in schools.  The new social web is not something we can all ban together and vote against, it is coming, it is here, it is changing things.

One useful categorization scheme I gleamed from the book was the three different types of online organization paradigms:  sharing, collaboration, and collective action.  Sharing takes place on sites like delicious, or flickr where the product really is a collection of things people have shared online, requiring little coordination or extra effort.  Collaboration is closer to Wikipedia, where argument, process, and group opinions matter, and people come together to create something that none of them would have created alone.  Collective action, such as MoveOn.org, or Voice of the Faithful (a Catholic reform group), use the web as a platform to coordinate large actions in real life that would not have been possible to form without the web.  I think most of the attention in research has focused on the first two categories, and largely ignored the third.

While there are many other insights I gleamed from the book, the one that probably relates closer to my research is the concept of the “bargain” online organizations have with their users.  Shirky argues that for an online organization to be successful it has to have a meaningful promise to it’s users, the right tools for the job, and a bargain of what the users can expect, and what the organization should expect.  Part of my research deals with the psychological contract users have with online organizations, especially as they become more central to the organization.  This bargain piece sounds very similar to a psychological contract, and it’s good to hear that others are pointing out it is necessary and interesting.  One example of a poor bargain that caused a failed community was Microsoft’s attempt to encourage user contributions to it’s encyclopedia Encarta.  Unfortunately, the bargain was that Microsoft had permission to “use, copy,distribute, transmit, reproduce” etc etc with Microsoft making money from the product, and the user having no further rights to their creation.

I am part of a student blog team in the OCIS division of Academy of Management.  I recently posted part three of an interview I conducted with Dr. Mike Smith here at Carnegie Mellon.

Check out part three the interview with Dr. Smith here.

I am part of a student blog team in the OCIS division of Academy of Management.  I recently posted part two of an interview I conducted with Dr. Mike Smith here at Carnegie Mellon.

Check out part two the interview with Dr. Smith here.

I am part of a student blog team in the OCIS division of Academy of Management.  I recently posted part one of an interview I conducted with Dr. Mike Smith here at Carnegie Mellon.

Check out part one the interview with Dr. Smith here.

The New York Times has an article [here] about the declining cost of supercomputers and what that means for “citizen scientists.”  From my (albeit limited) research experience it seems to me that very little research that would benefit from computing power is there is little research not being done because of lack of computing power.  The difficulties in crunching huge amounts of data are analyzing it in a meaningful way, cleaning it, and asking questions of interest.  But before you can get to that point, you have to have the data collected in one place, which seems to be a much greater bottleneck to research than is supercomputing power.

In general I disagree with the “flattening” power of cheaper supercomputers, for those with technical knowledge to query and analyze data from supercomputers they have always had access.  Those without the knowledge would not benefit from it to begin with.

NYT – Shared Supercomputing and Everyday Research

I recently came across an article in Time magazine stating that the fall of Wikipedia was inevitable, and cited how Wikipedia is not growing as fast as it once did.  I find it very fascinating that the commentary is that Wikipedia is becoming more and more bureaucratic, and in order to successfully contribute the barriers to entry are high:

Over time, though, a class system emerged; now revisions made by infrequent contributors are much likelier to be undone by élite Wikipedians. Chi also notes the rise of wiki-lawyering: for your edits to stick, you’ve got to learn to cite the complex laws of Wikipedia in arguments with other editors. Together, these changes have created a community not very hospitable to newcomers.

I am continuing research on Wikipedia Administrators and I find the organizational problem of how to “manage the crowd” a very interesting area.  Is it really inevitable that any organization must get more bureaucratic as it gets larger?  What organizational levers exist for Wikipedia to be able deal with its current issues as the contributor base grows?

Time Magazine – Is Wikipedia a Victim of Its Own Success?

My wife, and several friends are attempting to write a full novel in a month as part of an online group of writers all attempting the same thing called nanowrimo. I’m curious what papers or book chapters would look like if academics attempted this same thing, cranking out a few pages a day on an idea, then doing all the editing later.

In the book I’m reading now about writing your dissertation (Writing the Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, a terrible title if you ask me) the author suggests a similar idea.  The first phase of writing is the zero draft, in which your goal is to write 5 page a day, everyday.  The idea is to establish a strong connection between your thoughts and the paper by dumping everything that is in your head to overcome block or self criticism.  Later, several rounds of editing the zero draft put it into more finalized form.  I’m not sure how this works exactly with literature reviews, methods sections, and theory sections, but perhaps it is beneficial early on in the project.

I came across this article the other day that is an interesting study of personal networks and computer use. Here’s an interesting come back for anyone receiving flack for spending to much time on Facebook/Twitter and not enough in the real world…

This Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks.

Social Isolation and New Technology