Neighborhood listservs and neighborhood social networking websites have been described as helping to create social capital, or relationships between people in a neighborhood who use the platforms. Social capital creation has therefore been a key focus of what social networking platforms have to offer at a local level. But what if we were to shift the conversation and design objective away from creating social capital/building social networks towards creating/framing social interaction? What might we see in terms of benefits for supporting community building? To ask this questions I turn to the concept of social infrastructure.
Tag Archives: online communities
Final report on the Co-op
Over the past year I was part of a team that developed the Co-op, a newcomer support space on Wikipedia. The Co-op was designed to match newcomers with experienced Wikipedians around specific needs. In our final report we present our findings from the pilot, describing the existing newcomer support ecology on Wikipedia, where the Co-op fits in, as well as performance outcomes of new editors that used the Co-op. You can find the final report here.
Presenting at The 2014 Meeting for the Academy of Management
Today I presented research with my advisor, Dr. Carsten Osterlund, on the sociomateriality of newcomer socialization in the citizen science project, Planet Hunters. See the abstract of our talk below:
Crowdsourced initiatives rely on contributions from experienced and non-experienced contributors rather than on permanent workers. Such new organizational forms challenge existing theories of organizational socialization. Theoretically, the present paper merges insights from the socialization literature with notions of multiple spaces and forms of presence drawn from the sociomateriality debate, leading us to conceptualize socialization as emerging out of the mutual co-construction of the technical infrastructure and the volunteers. Combining virtual ethnography, trace ethnography, and survey responses, we study socialization of participants in a large citizen science project involving more than 800,000 participants. Our results depict newcomer socialization as a gradual change in the types of spaces participants perform. They start out performing scientific and communal system features as highly structured regional spaces characterized by authoritative-subject forms of relations. As they become more comfortable with the scientific practices some participants shift to perform system features as a resonance space characterized by a communal form of authority. The research contributes to our understanding of socialization in crowdsourced environments and implications their design and management.
http://program.aom.org/2014/submission.asp?mode=ShowSession&SessionID=2208
Abstract for Dissertation Proposal “Towards a Sociomaterial Perspective of Socialization in Open Online Collaborative Communities”
Socialization is a process where newcomers move from a state of uncertainty to a state of fluency in the practice, terminology, and behavior that define an organization. For settings where activities have a high degree of impact on the functionality and continued existence of the organization, socialization processes are particularly important (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979). While formal training models successfully integrate newcomers, crowdsourced projects like Wikipedia are unable to provide formal training due to the ad hoc assemblage of volunteers that participate. Studies on socialization in open online collaborative projects typically focus on information seeking, the impact of feedback, and the construction of social networks as newcomers make sense of their new environment. While such research is important, there is scant consideration for the material components of the online platforms and their role in the socialization process.
Building the Commons 