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

当代组织本质上是参与性的--特别是那些依赖互联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，组织的边界可以很容易地改变或解散，从而能够接纳新人并采用被广泛理解为更具参与性、更开放和更透明的新做法。这种特征并不局限于“网络基础设施”，而是媒体对互联网民主化和/或剥削力的报道所强调的更为普遍、但仍然知之甚少的社会现象的一部分。本项目探讨这种公众参与的性质和对当代组织的影响。目标是确定哪种参与对创新和合法化最有利，以及参与可能构成什么威胁，对谁来说。为了解决这些问题，该项目将收集和分析大量的人种学案例研究，使用一个用于协作定性研究的创新软件环境。该项目提出了三个问题：1.虚拟组织的个体发展如何影响参与的概念和实践？2.新的社会技术系统(如互联网)如何随着时间的推移改变科学、技术工程和医学(STEM)的参与？3.参与的质量与资源创建、管理和再利用的质量之间的关系是什么？这项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，我们根据以前研究中出现的主题，为这些案例研究增加了新的细节；对于问题2，我们增加了互联网出现之前的参与形式的案例，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，将数据作为宝贵的资源。

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.