VOSS: The Comparative Analysis and Theory of Participation in Socio-Technical Systems

VOSS：社会技术系统参与的比较分析和理论

• 批准号: 1322299
• 负责人: Christopher Kelty
• 金额: $ 36.05万
• 依托单位: University of California-Los Angeles
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2013
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2013-10-01 至 2017-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1322299&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: VOSS; Comparative; Analysis; Theory; Participation

Contemporary organizations are inherently participatory -- especially those that depend on the Internet as part of their functioning. Unlike older forms of organization, such "virtual organizations" have the distinguishing feature that organizational boundaries can be easily flexed or dissolved, allowing the inclusion of new people and the adoption of new practices broadly understood to be more participatory, open and transparent. Such a feature is not restricted to "cyberinfrastructures" but is part of a much more general, but still only poorly understood, social phenomena highlighted by press accounts of the democratizing and/or exploitative power of the Internet. This project explores the nature and effects of such public participation on contemporary organizations. The goal is to determine which kinds of participation are most beneficial for innovation and legitimation, as well as what kinds of threats participation might pose, and for whom. To address these questions, the project will collect and analyze a large number of ethnographic case studies, using an innovative software environment for collaborative qualitative research. The project poses three questions: 1. How does the ontogeny of a virtual organization affect conceptions and practices of participation? 2. How do new socio-technical systems (e.g. the Internet) transform participation in Science, Technology Engineering and Medicine (STEM) over time? 3. What is the relationship between the quality of participation and the quality of resource creation, curation and re-use? The research uses and extends a database of over 110 rich case studies of participation, and a software tool for evaluating participation across multiple cases. For question 1 we add new detail to these case studies, based on themes that have emerged from previous research; for question 2 we add cases of pre-Internet forms of participation, to explore more precisely the effects of technological change; and for question 3 we explore a new set of cases that focus on data as a valuable resource.

当代组织本质上是参与性的----特别是那些依赖因特网作为其运作一部分的组织。与旧的组织形式不同，这种“虚拟组织”的显著特点是，组织边界可以很容易地弯曲或解散，从而可以吸收新人，并采用被广泛认为更具参与性、开放性和透明性的新做法。 这一特点并不限于“网络基础设施”，而是一种更为普遍但仍知之甚少的社会现象的一部分，新闻报道强调了互联网的民主化和/或剥削力量。 这个项目探讨了这种公众参与对当代组织的性质和影响。 其目标是确定哪种参与对创新和合法化最有益，以及参与可能构成什么样的威胁，以及对谁构成威胁。 为了解决这些问题，该项目将收集和分析大量的民族志案例研究，使用创新的软件环境进行协作定性研究。该项目提出了三个问题：1。虚拟组织的个体发生如何影响参与的概念和实践？ 2.随着时间的推移，新的社会技术系统（如互联网）如何改变对科学、技术工程和医学（STEM）的参与？ 3.参与的质量与资源创造、管理和再利用的质量之间有什么关系？ 该研究使用并扩展了一个包含110多个丰富的参与案例研究的数据库，以及一个用于评估多个案例参与情况的软件工具。 对于问题1，我们根据先前研究中出现的主题，为这些案例研究添加了新的细节;对于问题2，我们添加了前互联网参与形式的案例，以更准确地探索技术变革的影响;对于问题3，我们探索了一组新的案例，重点关注数据作为宝贵资源。