- Aug 2018
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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This research built on earlier work showing that contrib-utors to bulletin boards, newsgroups, forums, and related systems adopteddurable “social roles” through their patterns of contribution (e.g., Fisher et al.,2006) – an approach that was subsequently applied to Wikipedia by Welseret al. (2011) and McDonald et al. (2011)
Curious why Benkler didn't cite Q&As and group blogs as peer production cases, e.g., Metafilter, DailyKos, etc., which operate quite differently than the examples listed here.
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A large body of descriptive work has also sought to characterize organi-zational dimensions of Wikipedia and the practices of its contributors.
The cited Wikipedia literature intersect a number of focus areas including qualitative studies od participation, production process, governance, onboarding and socializing activities, leadership and quantitative/inductive studies of the organization.
Again, is the number and depth of citations here simply a result of Benkler's interest/knowledge area? Or is there something fundamentally different between FLOSS and Wikipedia?
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Much of the earliest empirical research inductively sought to describe thestructure and organization of FLOSS communities
The FLOSS literature that Benkler cites seems to be much more focused on organizational structures than the Wikipedia study examples in the next paragraph.
I'm curious why that is the case? Is there a wider body of related work than Benkler is citing? Maybe the FLOSS production process is less accessible than Wikipedia which is entirely online and embedded in its site. Is this a convenience issue more so than a diverse interest issue?
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Other foundational accounts, like Moglen (1999) and Weber (2004),attended to the emergence of informal hierarchies and governance arrange-ments within communities.
Other early work focused on organizational attributes, like how information goods were produced with flat/informal hierarchies, community values/norms, and governance structures.
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Peer productioncould, Benkler argued, outperform traditional organizational forms underconditions of widespread access to networked communications technologies,a multitude of motivations driving contributions, and non-rival informationcapable of being broken down into granular, modular, and easy-to-integrate
Benkler's early work studied "the role of non-exclusive property regimes and more permeable organizational boundaries" for knowledge products.
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Initial scholarship on the organization of peer production emphasized the-oretical distinctions between peer production, bureaucracy, and transactioncost explanations of firms and markets.
Description of early research
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Indeed, peer production com-munities perform all of the “classical” organizational functions like coordina-tion, division of labor, recruitment, training, norm creation and enforcement,conflict resolution, and boundary maintenance – but do so in the absence ofmany of the institutions associated with more traditional organizations.
List of typical activities enacted in peer production communities. Early research sought to identify these activities and the unique nature of peer production work. Later studies examined the effectiveness of peer production and how the activities as communities mature.
Benkler notes later in the same passage:
"However, as peer production communities have aged, some have acquired increasingly formal organizational attributes, including bureaucratic rules and routines for interaction and control."
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In the rest of this chapter, we describe the development of the academicliterature on peer production and collective intelligence in three areas – or-ganization, motivation, and quality. In each area, we introducefoundationalworkconsisting primarily of earlier scholarship that sought to describe peerproduction and establish its legitimacy. Subsequently, we characterize work,usually more recent, that seeks to pursuenew directionsand to derive morenuanced analytical insights. Because FLOSS and Wikipedia have generatedthe majority of the peer production research to date, we focus on researchanalyzing those efforts. For each theoretical area, we briefly synthesize bothfoundational work and new directions and describe some of the challenges forfuture scholarship. Neither our themes nor our periodization are intended toencompass the complete literature on peer production. Instead, they reflectcore areas of research that speak most directly to the literature on collectiveintelligence and locate peer production within that broader phenomenon. Weconclude with a discussion of several issues that traverse our themes and impli-cations of peer production scholarship for research on collective intelligencemore broadly.
Nice example of foregrounding and roadmapping for an essay/paper
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Although peer production is central to social scientific and legal researchon collective intelligence, not all examples of collective intelligence created inonline systems are peer production. First, (1) collective intelligence can in-volve centralized control over goal-setting and execution of tasks.
Not all collective intelligence is peer production.
Peer production must adhere to values: de-centralized control, broad range of motives/incentives and FLOSS/creative commons rights.
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Peer production is the most significant organizational in-novation that has emerged from Internet-mediated social practice, among themost visible and important examples of collective intelligence, and a centraltheoretical frame used by social scientists and legal scholars of collective intel-ligence.
Benkler ranks peer production's place in the social science literature on collective intelligence.
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Following Benkler (2013), we define peer produc-tion as a form of open creation and sharing performed by groups online that:set and execute goals in a decentralized manner; harness a diverse range ofparticipant motivations, particularly non-monetary motivations; and sepa-rate governance and management relations from exclusive forms of propertyand relational contracts (i.e., projects are governed as open commons or com-mon property regimes and organizational governance utilizes combinationsof participatory, meritocratic and charismatic, rather than proprietary or con-
Peer production definition per Benkler.
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Consistent with this exam-ple, foundational social scientific research relevant to understanding collec-tive intelligence has focused on three central concerns: (1) explaining the or-ganization and governance of decentralized projects, (2) understanding themotivation of contributors in the absence of financial incentives or coerciveobligations, and (3) evaluating the quality of the products generated throughcollective intelligence systems.
Focus of related work in collective intelligence studies:
• organizational governance • motives • product quality
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Historically,researchers in diverse fields such as communication, sociology, law, and eco-nomics have argued that effective human systems organize people through acombination of hierarchical structures (e.g., bureaucracies), completely dis-tributed coordination mechanisms (e.g., markets), and social institutions ofvarious kinds (e.g., cultural norms). However, the rise of networked systemsand online platforms for collective intelligence has upended many of the as-sumptions and findings from this earlier research.
Benkler argues that the process, motives, and cultural norms of online network-driven knowledge work are different than systems previously studied and should be re-evaluated.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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mporal features. We have then to consider how organizational participants are affected by situations containing temporal features, but also how these actors shape, by their behavior and beliefs, local context according to their needs.
This provides a good framework for the SBTF study that social coordination practices can sometimes be at odds with the "structures that bear significant temporal features."
Could this mean data as well as events?
Is this passage invoking activity theory, if it were an HCI study?
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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s a means for coordinating action among groups of users (e.g., Bardram, 2005, this volume)
social coordination and activity theory
get this paper
Bardram, J.E. (2005, September). Activity-based computing: Support for mobility and collaboration in ubiquitous computing. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 9(5), 312–322.
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The hierarchical structure of the Boer et al. adaptation of the Activity Theory model can help to reconcile the differences in granularity and the difficulties of supporting collaboration identified in our work; future activity-centered user interfaces might take advantage of the zoomable user interface paradigm or feature control over the level of detail (LOD) represented in the interface to more accurately reflect the depth at which a given user conceptualizes their own tasks or the tasks of their colleagues.
Boer extension attends to some of the challenges which began this paper
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Activities also span place; that is, it is common for work to take place outside of the immediate office environment. However, current office technologies sometimes present a very different view of information across different physical and virtual settings.
"Activities exist across places"
Here the paper conceptualizes "place" as physical location as well as mobile environment.
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The idea that activities may exist at different levels of granularity is not a new one. Boer, van Baalen & Kumar (2002) provide a model explaining how an activity at one level of analysis may be modeled as an action—a component of an activity—at another. This holds true for individual users, as in the example provided above, but is even more pronounced when a single activity is viewed from multiple participants’ perspectives.
"Activities exist at different levels of granularity"
Hierarchical level of analysis; Action < Activity
The idea of granularity also seems to have a temporal component. See examples before this passage.
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Additionally, activities need to be represented in such a way that their contents can be shared, with the caveats that individual participants in an activity may have very different perceptions of the activity, they may bring different resources to play over the course of the activity, and, particularly for large activities in which many individual users participate, users themselves may come and go over the life of the activity.
Large group social coordination challenges are particularly salient to the SBTF studies.
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Recognizing the mediating role of the digital work environment in enabling users to meaningfully collaborate is a critical step to ensuring the success of these systems.
"Activities are collaborative"
Activity representations are also crucial here, as is the "mediating role of the digital work environment" for collaboration.
Flag this to connect to the Goffman reading (Presentation of Self in Everyday Life) and crowdsourcing/collective intelligence readings.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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At present, information and communication technologies con-tinue to reshape temporal experience and collective time consciousness (Nowotny, 1989b)
Get this paper.
Nowotny, H. (1989b) 'Mind, Technologies, and Collective Time Consciousness', in J. T. Fraser (ed.) Time and Mind, The Study of Time VI, pp. 197-216. Madison, CT: International Universities Press.
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Despite the apparent diversity of themes, certain common patterns can be discerned in empirical studies dealing with time. They bear the imprint of the ups and downs of research fashions as well as the waxing and waning of influences from neighbouring disciplines. But they all acknowledge 'time as a problem' in 'time-compact' societies (Lenntorp, 1978), imbued with the pressures of time that come from time being a scarce resource.
Overview of interdisciplinary, empirical time/temporality studies from late 70s to 80s. (contemporary to this book)
Cites Carey "The Case of the Telegraph" -- "impact of the telegraph on the standardization of time"
Cites Bluedorn -- "it is omnipresent indecision-making, deadlines andother aspects of organizational behaviour like various forms of group processes"
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Another strategy in dealing with sui generis time consists in juxtaposing clock time to the various forms of 'social time' and considers the latter as the more 'natural' ones, i.e. closer to subjective perceptions of time, or to the temporality that results from adaptations to seasons or other kinds of natural (biological, environmental) rhythm. This strategy, often couched also in terms of an opposition between 'linear' clock time and 'cyclical' time of natural and social rhythms devalues, or at least ques-tions, the temporality of formal organizations which rely heavily on clock time in fulfilling their coordinative and integrative and controlling functions (Young, 1988; Elchardus, 1988).
by contrasting social time (as a natural phenomenon) against clock time, allows for a more explicit perspective on linear time (clock) and social rhythms when examining social coordination.
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Sorokin and Merton (1937) may be said to have provided the 'definitive' classic statement on the distinction between social and natural time. They associate the physical time of diurnal and seasonal cycles with clock time and define this time as 'purely quantitative, shorn of qualitative variation' (p. 621). 'All time systems', Sorokin and Merton suggest further, 'may be reduced to the need of providing means for synchronising and co-ordinating the activities and observations of the constituents of groups' (p. 627).
classic definition of "social time" vs "natural time". This thinking is now contested.
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- Jul 2018
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Brown and Eisenhardt studied change and project management in computer firms and found that firms with less successful project portfolios demonstrated very low amounts of communication across projects. This was part of the context in which projects were planned, divided into small tasks, and then executed in a “structured sequence of steps” (1997, p. 14). A structured sequence is, of course, a monochronic strategy, and the low amount of communication is consistent with the proposition that monochronic strategies generate less awareness of other activities and tasks. One of the managers in their study remarked, “Most people only look at their part” (p. 14); another, “The work of everyone else doesn’t really affect my work” (p. 14). These responses contrasted with the pattern of work in the companies that managed their portfolios of projects more successfully, which Brown and Eisenhardt characterized as “iterative” (p. 14). Iterative (repetitive) patterns are suggestive of the back and forth flow of polychronic strategies
Iterative/repetitive work patterns suggest "back and forth flow of polychronic strategies."
Key point for SBTF social coordination: "At the less successful it was difficult to adjust projects in changing conditions because 'once started, the process took over.' It was hard to backtrack or reshape product specifications as circumstances changed."
Polychronic strategy: Higher level of willingness to adjust/correct work per feedback.
Monchronic strategy: Greater degree of satisificing in decision making.
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in a more polychronic culture, people would stand closer to each other while talking. So time and space are related in the social as well as the physical world.
Could the relationship between polychronicity and physical proximity help to explain the use of situated and/or spatial language in globalized, virtual social coordination work?
Note: National studies of polychronicity have been conducted through qualitative methods (observation and interviews)
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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Leshed and Sengers’s research reminds us that calendars are not just tools for the management of time, but are also sites of identity work where people can project to themselves and others the density of their days and apparent ‘success’ at doing it all[26]. These seemingly innocuous artifacts can thus perpetuate deeper normative logics a
The dark side of time artifacts and the social pressure of busyness/industriousness as a virtue.
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. When creating tools for schedulingandcoordination, it is crucial to provide ways for people to take into account not just the multiplicity of (potentially dissonant) rhythms [22, 46], but also the differential affective experiencesof time rendered by such rhythms.
Design implication: How to accommodate rhythms and obligation with social coordination work?
".. one 'chunk' of time is not equivalent to any other 'chunk'"
Tags
- rhythm
- design implication
- time presence
- sociotemporality
- social coordination
- collaborative artifacts
Annotators
URL
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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This point ties into the conceptualisation of time as collec-tive [29] and entangled [43]. The infrastructure that sup-ports a 24/7 society is one that relies on people as well as technologies, the conventional nine-to-five work rhythm, for example, being underpinned by people working shifts outside of these hours.
How are the concepts of collective and entangled time reflected in virtual social coordination, if at all? Is it the same, similar or something wholly different?
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Notably, a practice-oriented treatment of digital time does open up avenues for research and design, one that resonates with Kuutti and Bannon’s [23] recent account of a practice perspective forming a new paradigm for HCI. They propose that a central issue in a practice-based research agenda is the need to develop the capability to transform practices through technology. Essential to this is understanding the role of computer artefacts in the emergence and transfor-mation of practices, and the possibilities for influencing these by changing the artefacts themselves.
How can artifacts be incorporated into a revised SBTF data collection practices? What would that look like as a product of social coordination?
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How can we design for time as collective and interdependent, rather than individualised on the one hand, or explicitly scheduled on the other? What does it mean to position collective time not as something that is achieved when people come together, but as a set of relationships through which they are connected? Both Sharma and Mazmanian and Erickson raise this challenge while highlighting the difficulty in addressing it; neither offer a solution.
The big question!
Design implication: One advantage that SBTF has is that its work is very relationship-oriented.
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Designing for an alternative temporal experience means understanding the ways in which multiple temporali-ties intersect, whether these frame a person’s working day, or allow a family to spend time together. While scheduling technologies do of course have a role to play here [see e.g. 31], many of the temporal structures that frame everyday life are not so much scheduled as unfold in a way that isunremarkable [54], or are so firmly established that they are no longer seen as alterable.
Design implication: To integrate multiple temporalities into technology we need to reconsider temporal structures -- or the patterns of social coordination that we use as rules, rhythms, habits, and practices that guide activity.
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In his analysis of the concept, Southerton [45] identifies quality time as a contemporary concern, and uses it alongside an analysis of diaries written in 1937 and 2000 to examine the impression that everyday life is speeding up. His findings lead him to argue that the feeling of time pressure that seems inherent to modern life is due to difficulties in coor-dinating practices, rather than the sheer density of events that need to be accomplished.
Design implication: Insufficient coordination practices leads to sociotemporal stress (sense of urgency, lack of time, etc.)
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wendynorris.com wendynorris.com
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While the Printer Clock focused on emphasising the embodied and situated nature of time, pointing to the mesh of activities and characters that come together to create time, the TimeBots drew attention to personal rhythms and how they played out within the context of the classroom
Pschetz, et al., also use idea of "situated time."
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Thus in developing a theoretical framework which could support an understanding of time as multiple, heterogeneous and deeply entangled within various social formations (which may be discrete or overlapping), work in the social sciences, particularly anthropology and sociology, has proven to be more useful. Such approaches enable us to ask different questions about what time is and how it works. Rather than seeing time as a flow between past, present and future (whether this be linear or nonlinear), it becomes possible to ask how time operates as a system for social collaboration (Sorokin and Merton 1937), how it legitimates some and ‘manages’ others (Greenhouse 1996), or how it works within systems of exclusion (Fabian 1983). We thus move from time as flow to time as s
Describes how time bridges into the concept of social coordination.
Look up the Sorokin and Merton (1937). Greenhouse (1996) and Fabian (1983) papers to get a better handle on how "social coordination" is defined.
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- May 2017
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marconisociety.org marconisociety.org
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The Triple Feedback Loop offers a compass by aligning the information flows in a framework for operating a network of disparate players with different goals who work together on an overarching goal.
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- Jul 2015
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www.bostonfed.org www.bostonfed.org
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On average, each cash - using household pays $1 49 to card - using households and each card - using h ousehold receives $1, 133 from cash users every year. Because credit card spending and rewards are positively correlated with household income, the payment instrument transfer also induces a regressive transfer from low - income to high - income households in g eneral
It is a persistent challenge to act in the interest of the group in lieu of one's own interest in absence of a guarantee against coordination failure. It should be widely recognized as an important virtue to do so.
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