[4eyes] Scratch, Wikipedia:Invited Talk Today: Benjamin Mako Hill

[Saiph Savage]

Hey Folks
Prof. Mako from UW  is coming today to visit UCSB. Please join us for his
talk at 4 in HFH. He has worked on the scratch online community, Wikipedia,
and interfaces for collective action.

Info about his talk below.


Thursday April 16, 2015

4:00pm

1132 Harold Frank Hall





*Volunteer Mobilization in Peer Production*



*Professor Benjamin Mako Hill (University of Washington)*



Although some examples of Internet-based collaborative "peer production" —
like Wikipedia and Linux — build large volunteer communities and
high-quality information goods, the vast majority of attempts at peer
production, like other forms of collective action, never even attract a
second contributor. I will present three studies that describe and test
theories on the sources and dynamics of volunteer mobilization in peer
production.



The first study is a qualitative analysis of seven attempts to create
English-language online collaborative encyclopedia projects started before
January, 2001, when Wikipedia was launched. I will offer a set of three
propositions for why Wikipedia, similar to previous efforts and a
relatively late entrant, attracted a community of hundreds of thousands
while the other projects did not.



In the second study, I will use data from the Scratch online community — a
large website where young people openly share and remix animations and
games, present evidence of a trade-off between "generativity" (i.e.,
qualities of work products likely to attract follow-on contributors) and
the originality of the derivative work products that follow.



In the final study, I will consider the relationship between volunteer
mobilization and governance in peer production organizations. Although
large successful peer production projects have inspired a wave of social
movements and scholars, I hypothesize that, like other democratic
organizations, peer production exhibits governance consistent with Robert
Michels' "Iron Law of Oligarchy."



*Benjamin Mako Hill* is a social scientist, technologist, and activist. In
all three roles, he works to understand why some attempts at peer
production — like Wikipedia and Linux — build large volunteer communities
while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. He is an
Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of
Washington. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Berkman Center for
Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative
Social Science — both at Harvard University. He has also been a leader,
developer, and contributor to the free and open source software community
for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the
author of several best-selling technical books, a member of the Free
Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia
Foundation. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab and a PhD from
MIT in an interdepartmental program between the Sloan School of Management
and the Media Lab.


-- 
Saiph Savage
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