A Pervasive Model for Participation in Voluntary Forums

Abstract

OVERVIEW:Thanks to Internet technology and social media, voluntary challenges and forums have become a widespread form of collaboration for business; examples include Wikipedia, Innocentive, and many internal corporate systems. Participation in these systems follows the same pattern across industries and public forums, at scales from dozens to millions of contributors. This pattern—a long tail of participation, with a few very active contributors and many occasional contributors—is very different from behavior in internal business teams. The universality of this model has important implications for mass collaboration initiatives; its parameters are easily known, which makes it straightforward to predict participation and project whether the content generated will represent a minority or majority opinion. The factors that affect these parameters are also known, although our ability to influence them is often limited. Networks and communities may be involved but are not necessary; it may be more accurate to say that input comes from an audience of individual contributors. Because these results are very different from what is expected of traditional business teams, managers considering social collaboration initiatives should take note.