CHS: Small: Collaborative Research: Modeling the Ecological Dynamics of Online Organizations

该项目将通过对在线社区生态动力学理论的阐述和实证验证，促进对大型虚拟组织的科学理解。这项工作将建立在最近关于在线社区之间相互依赖的社会计算研究的基础上，这些研究表明，生态分析不仅可以提供新的科学理解，还可以为管理在线社区提供可行的战略。它将为社会计算系统的研究贡献成功合作的环境先决条件的知识。它还将通过将这些领域的理论和模型改编和应用到一个拥有丰富详细沟通和行为数据的新领域，为组织社会学和复杂系统科学做出贡献。本研究开发的理论和实证分析将为系统设计者、志愿组织、运动和社区领导人提供实用知识，了解他们如何在决策过程中考虑环境条件。研究将围绕三个相互关联的项目来回答基本的生态学问题：单个在线社区的增长和生存是如何由其环境中的活动塑造的？社区如何以对其成功有利或有害的方式相互作用？社区如何在其环境中战略性地构建和发现增长和生产力的机会？这一方法将应用于三个流行的自愿组织和开放协作的在线平台：Wikia、Reddit和Stack Exchange。对于每个平台，预测将来自生态理论，即社区的成功如何与其他社区的存在、缺席和行为相关，以及与用户形式的外部资源和对主题的潜在兴趣的变化有关。这些预测将使用从平台获取的纵向数字轨迹数据的大规模统计分析进行经验验证。最后，这些结果将被综合成一个在线社区的内聚生态理论。在这项工作中，该团队还将设计、构建和发布软件和独特的研究数据集，供其他研究人员使用。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will advance scientific understanding of large scale virtual organizations through the elaboration and empirical validation of a theory of ecological dynamics of online communities. The work will build on recent research in social computing on interdependence between online communities that suggests that ecological analyses can provide not only novel scientific understandings, but also viable strategies for managing online communities. It will contribute knowledge of the environmental preconditions of successful collaboration to the study of social computing systems. It will also contribute to organizational sociology and complex systems science by adapting and applying theories and models from these areas into a novel domain that is rich in detailed communication and behavioral data. The theory and empirical analyses developed in this research will provide system designers, voluntary organizations, movements, and community leaders with practical knowledge of how they can account for environmental conditions in their decision making processes.The research will be structured around three linked projects answering fundamental ecological questions: How is the growth and survival of individual online communities shaped by activity within their environments? How do communities interact with each other in ways that are beneficial or harmful to their success? How can communities strategically build and discover opportunities for growth and productivity in their environments? This approach will be applied to three popular online platforms for voluntary organization and open collaboration: Wikia, Reddit, and Stack Exchange. For each platform, predictions will be derived from ecological theory about how communities' success relates to the presence, absence, and behavior of other communities and to variation in external resources in the form of users and underlying interest in topics. These predictions will be tested empirically using large scale statistical analyses of longitudinal digital trace data drawn from the platforms. Finally, these results will be synthesized into a cohesive theory of ecology for online communities. In the course of this work, the team will also design, build, and publish software and unique research datasets for other researchers to use.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.