CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Pathways to Community Success: Advancing a Comparative Science of Online Collaborative Organization

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This research project seeks to understand the factors that encourage success in computer-supported peer production - the form of online collaborative organization used to create public information goods like Wikipedia and Linux. Why do some peer production systems mobilize large communities of contributors and create valuable information goods while most do not? One answer for this challenging question is that success-related factors may change significantly as a collaborative organization grows, such that conditions that encouraged explosive growth in the beginning may prevent further growth later on. This work will provide actionable insights for initiators and managers of online collaborative organizations, informing the design and management of distributed collaboration across different topic domains at different stages of project development. It will also produce freely licensed and publicly available computational research systems and datasets that will enable reproducible research and the dissemination of the new techniques developed by the research. Peer production and related forms of online collaboration in virtual communities have diffused widely in software production, knowledge management, cultural production, and education. Another sign of its significance is the fact that a growing number of organizations look to distributed collaboration managed through virtual and volunteer communities as a source of innovation and customer support.This research uses longitudinal comparative analysis of populations of peer production communities to elaborate a novel and transformative science of pathways to effective collaborative organization. In doing so, it will extend the rich traditions of sociotechnical systems research and organization science on these topics. This empirical work will explore three central facets of peer production: (1) the relationship between participation equality and growth; (2) the extent to which community effectiveness is limited by competition for volunteer resources; and (3) the role of social interaction and coordination in productive collaboration. In every case, empirical predictions will be developed from prior work and tested using trace data from a large population of peer production wikis. The research will then explore how the observed relationships may diminish or even reverse as communities grow. The findings will become the basis for a broader theory of collaborative organization that explains how key drivers of mobilization in nascent groups differ systematically from those in established communities.