Coordination in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities: Evaluation, Analysis, and Design for Emergent Systems
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Coordination in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities: Evaluation, Analysis, and Design for Emergent Systems Michael D. Gilbert A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2015 Reading Committee: Mark Zachry, Chair David W. McDonald Benjamin Mako Hill Kate Starbird Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Human Centered Design & Engineering 1 ©Copyright 2015 Michael D. Gilbert 2 University of Washington Abstract Coordination in Commons-Based Peer Production Communities: Evaluation, Analysis, and Design for Emergent Systems Michael D. Gilbert Chair of the Supervisory Committee Professor Mark Zachry Human Centered Design & Engineering Traditional organizations are often relatively structured, involving hierarchies of individual agents driving progress through production, with well-defined boundaries between internal requirements and external expectations and with explicit goals set to drive work processes to their ideal end. Modern commons-based peer production communities, however, exist in a different reality, both conceptually and physically. These communities of collaborators are often identified by their distributed agents acting among distributed teams, functioning without formal hierarchy, each contributing to disparate projects with divergent goals, each with myriad individual motivations, all leading to an emergent order that arises not from managerial decree but from the mass of actors participating in the melee. In these communities, coordination is no longer a top-down process that can be centrally controlled. It is instead a product of emergent order; it is a product of the ongoing and ever changing narrative of the individual actors contributing to and ultimately shaping those communities they interact within. This dissertation examines such coordination within one of the most visible commons-based peer production communities – Wikipedia. Within Wikipedia, millions of volunteers have contributed to create one of the largest and most visited resources in the world, a free online encyclopedia with the goal to make available the sum of all human knowledge. While prior research has contributed to theoretical understanding of coordination in organizations, no such theory exists for modern commons-based peer production communities. This dissertation presents such a theory, grounded in observations of the agents within that community, with the capacity to explicate the many discrete interactions that inform the whole, to identify the means by which those interactions succeed or fail, and to ultimately provide a theoretical foundation for future design interventions. Finally, to validate this theory I present the Virtual Team Explorer, a theory-driven design study resulting in a prototype application intended to facilitate the coordination of distributed actors within WikiProjects in Wikipedia, along with the tools and requisite documentation that make such an intervention possible. 3 [This page intentionally left blank] 4 A dedication: For the patient. And the curious. 5 Acknowledgements A heartfelt thanks is deserved, and one readily extended, for all the individuals and actors who engaged with and supported this work. First, I would like to thank my advisor, Professor Mark Zachry, for his consistent and tireless support throughout my time in the program, for his encouragement of both the ideas that led to the work in this dissertation as well as the ideas that still ruminate, awaiting their time to arise. As well, I would like to thank Professor David McDonald, for the opportunities he provided, for challenging good ideas and improving bad ones, and for the patience he exhibited in the face of unending streams of emails and questions from me. I would also like to thank the members of my dissertation committee, among them Mark and David: Kate Starbird and Benjamin Mako Hill. From early on these individuals provided a basis for exploration and inquisition, each lending their efforts to support the provenance and development of the research which follows, and to the researcher striving to create it. Equally deserving of credit are those that have endured my run-on sentences and dangling participles, as well my enthusiasm which occasionally masks my naiveté. Among them, much credit goes to Jonathan Morgan, my academic brother, for his insight and encouragement, and Elizabeth Churchill, for consistently driving me to become a better researcher and never failing to believe that drive was justified. I would also like to thank the members of my research group, without whom this work would not have been possible: Jessica Bao, Margaret Lyons, Greg Robison, and Ruiyi Zhou. I would also like to thank my HCDE brethren for their support, encouragement, and occasional happy hour, among them Taylor Scott, Daniel Perry, and Doug Divine. I would like to thank the National Science Foundation (Grants IIS-0811210 and IIS-1162114) for funding this research, and the larger HCDE and University of Washington for providing me with the opportunity and encouragement to complete that research. Finally, I thank my family, specifically brother, Scott Gilbert, and my mother and father, Barbara Gilbert and Michael Gilbert, for their encouragement, support, and their enduring belief that pretty much most of the time, pretty much anything is possible. Lastly, I thank my friends, Joe and Jen Vollan, Nichole Rathburn, and Corey McDonough, for listening to and participating in the many late night conversations regarding arcane subjects, both related to this work and not. 6 Table of Contents Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................ 3 Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................................... 6 List of Tables ................................................................................................................................................ 10 List of Figures .............................................................................................................................................. 11 Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 13 Communities of Collaboration: Situating Modern Conceptions of Community in Socio-Technical Systems ..................................................................................................................................................... 14 Peer Production of the Sum of all Human Knowledge: A Brief Introduction to the Curious Case of Wikipedia .................................................................................................................................................. 17 Structures of Collaboration: Projects, Problems, and Solutions ............................................................ 19 Structure of this Dissertation & Research Goals ....................................................................................... 20 A Brief Note on Authorial Voice .......................................................................................................... 23 Part I – Overview of Prior Research: Foundations for Development .................................................... 24 1.1 Understanding Wikipedia ................................................................................................................... 24 1.1.1 Understanding Wikipedia: How Measurement Shapes Participation and Value ......................... 25 1.1.2 Prior Conceptions of Coordination in Wikipedia ........................................................................ 27 1.2 Collaboration in Commons-Based Peer Production communities ..................................................... 33 1.3 Coordination Theory – a Brief Primer ............................................................................................... 35 1.4 Conclusion to Part I ............................................................................................................................ 36 Part II – Grounding Coordination: Understanding Interactions in Context ........................................ 38 2.1 Study 1: Managing complexity: Strategies for Group Awareness and Coordinated Action in Wikipedia .................................................................................................................................................. 38 2.1.1 Introduction – Exploring Opportunities for Ambient Information Transfer ................................ 39 2.1.2 Two Key Awareness Mechanisms in WikiProjects ..................................................................... 39 2.1.3 Research Hypotheses: Assessing the Impact of the Hot Articles Situational Awareness Mechanism in WikiProjects................................................................................................................... 41 2.1.4 Research Method: Data Collection and Analysis for the Hot Articles Tool ................................ 41 2.1.5 Results: Analyzing the Impact of Awareness Tools on Levels of Contribution .......................... 45 2.1.6 Discussion ................................................................................................................................... 48 2.2 Conclusion to Study 1 .......................................................................................................................