Peer Production Model Research Articles

Taboo and Collaborative Knowledge Production: Evidence from Wikipedia

By definition, people are reticent or even unwilling to talk about taboo subjects. Because subjects like sexuality, health, and violence are taboo in most cultures, important information on each of these subjects can be difficult to obtain. Are peer produced knowledge bases like Wikipedia a promising approach for providing people with information on taboo subjects? With its reliance on volunteers who might also be averse to taboo, can the peer production model produce high-quality information on taboo subjects? In this paper, we seek to understand the role of taboo in knowledge bases produced by volunteers. We do so by developing a novel computational approach to identify taboo subjects and by using this method to identify a set of articles on taboo subjects in English Wikipedia. We find that articles on taboo subjects are more popular than non-taboo articles and that they are frequently vandalized. Despite frequent vandalism attacks, we also find that taboo articles are higher quality than non-taboo articles. We hypothesize that stigmatizing societal attitudes will lead contributors to taboo subjects to seek to be less identifiable. Although our results are consistent with this proposal in several ways, we surprisingly find that contributors make themselves more identifiable in others.

A Peer Production Model for Citizen Science: Comparative Analysis of Three Online Platforms

A Peer Production Model for Citizen Science: Comparative Analysis of Three Online Platforms

Thinking Globally, Acting Locally: Lessons from the U.S., China, and Japan

State and local climate action has played a key role in the global response to climate change. Still, not all jurisdictions are engaged in emissions reductions, and some are actively recalcitrant. What prompts some state and local governments to take action while prompting others to resist? This Article makes several contributions to understanding state and local climate policies. First, prior efforts have generally had a U.S. focus. We broaden the inquiry to include the two leading Asian economies. Second, we make use of a fifty-state survey of recent state climate and energy initiatives in the United States rather than focusing on a few prominent jurisdictions like California. Third, rather than focusing solely on activist jurisdictions, we discuss the full range of stances on energy policy, from the leadership of states like California in the United States and cities like Shenzhen in China to the resistance of some rural areas of the United States, China, and Japan to climate action. We identify important economic, demographic, and geographic drivers of climate and energy policies in these diverse jurisdictions. Finally, we propose a new way of conceptualizing subnational climate action based on the peer production model used in the creation of important digital resources.

Kolaboratif Faaliyet Modelinin Çelişkileri: Ekşi Sözlük Sanal Topluluğunda Cinsiyetçi Söylem ve Pratiklere Dair Bir İnceleme

Established in 1999, Eksi Sozluk, the largest (and oldest) urban dictionary in Turkey, has consistently managed to retain its popularity with the online audience. It has a unique peer-production model for organizing cultural knowledge about everyday life in Turkish society. Although online communities were initially theorized as autonomous and libertarian spaces, they have turned into reflections of the societies in which they exist today. This transformation is perhaps best reflected in gender relations within online communities. Toxic masculinity and patriarchal practices commonplace in everyday life not only poison the fabric of online communities but also disrupt the dynamics of peer-produced cultural knowledge. Using the netnographic method, this study examines gender relations in the Eksi Sozluk online community. The most striking aspect of our findings is that some of the male community members persistently abuse Eksi Sozluk’s peer production mechanisms, turning them into a means of harassing female users. Our findings suggest that the mechanisms that organize collaborative cultural activities have become in practice tools reinforcing male cultural hegemony in the community.

Micro-Economic Benefits of Peer-Producing Containerized Network Functions

Discrete, non-virtualized network elements are characterized by large costs, limited functions, vendor lock-in, and limited orchestration. Virtualization technologies like virtual machines (VM) and containers have expanded the scope of virtual resource utilization through consolidation of workloads that were previously running on multiple servers by running them on a single server. With the advent of Network Functions Virtualization (NFV), industries are able to reduce the micro-economic factors associated with vendor proprietary model such as transaction costs and (physical and human) asset specificity to deal with vendor vulnerabilities in contractual relationships because Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) can virtualize dedicated networking functions that were traditionally performed by vendor appliances such as routers, switches, firewalls, and load balancers. Even though virtualization technologies (VMs and containers) and NFV have demonstrated their benefits in the market, little attention has been devoted to the development and adoption of containers to build VNFs. This research paper identifies micro-economic factors, such as transaction costs, associated with searching, buying, provisioning, and maintenance of vendor proprietary appliances and compares them with the coordination costs associated with the adoption of containerized VNFs. This comparative analysis could be used to identify the type of network operators that could serve as key organizers (the network operator who can benefit largely by adopting containerized VNFs) of an open source peer production model as well as other firms that could serve as individual contributors. Furthermore, to identify various rewards and incentives that a managerial firm can leverage to motivate its employees to participate in such an effort, a quantitative survey was conducted (with Tier 1, Tier 2 and Tier 3 Service Providers) to identify the managerial incentives such as bonuses, rewards, peer recognition, and promotion targeting varied network operator firms to accurately capture and analyze employee interests/motivation. Finally, the paper shows a measuring framework to evaluate individual contributors based on the project modularity and indicates the viability of this model.

The Crowd is the Territory: Assessing Quality in Peer-Produced Spatial Data During Disasters

ABSTRACT Today, disaster events are mobilizing digital volunteers to meet the data needs of those on the ground. One form of this crowd work is Volunteered Geographic Information. This peer-produced spatial data creates the most up-to-date map of the affected region; maintaining the accuracy of these data is therefore a critical task. Accuracy is one aspect of data quality, a relative concept requiring standards to measure against. The field of Geographic Information Sciences has developed standards for this comparison, achieving widespread acceptance. However, the peer production model of spatial data presents new opportunities—and challenges—to traditional methods of quality assessment. Through analysis of the OpenStreetMap database, we show that temporal editing patterns and contributor characteristics can provide additional means of understanding spatial data quality. Drawing upon experiences from Wikipedia, we offer and evaluate three intrinsic quality metrics of peer-produced spatial data to assess the quality of contributions to OpenStreetMap for crisis response.

From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism

Two prominent social progressive movements are faced with a few contradictions and a paradox. On the one side, we have a re-emergence of the co-operative movement and worker-owned enterprises which suffer from certain structural weaknesses. On the other, we have an emergent field of open and Commons-oriented peer production initiatives which create common pools of knowledge for the whole of humanity, but are dominated by start-ups and large multinational enterprises using the same Commons. Thus we have a paradox: the more communist the sharing license used in the peer production of free software or open hardware, the more capitalist the practice. To tackle this paradox and the aforementioned contradictions, we tentatively suggest a new convergence that would combine both Commons-oriented open peer production models with common ownership and governance models, such as those of the co-operatives and the solidarity economic models.

From the Communism of Capital to Capital for the Commons: Towards an Open Co-operativism

Two prominent social progressive movements are faced with a few contradictions and a paradox. On the one side, we have a re-emergence of the co-operative movement and worker-owned enterprises which suffer from certain structural weaknesses. On the other, we have an emergent field of open and Commons-oriented peer production initiatives which create common pools of knowledge for the whole of humanity, but are dominated by start-ups and large multinational enterprises using the same Commons. Thus we have a paradox: the more communist the sharing license used in the peer production of free software or open hardware, the more capitalist the practice. To tackle this paradox and the aforementioned contradictions, we tentatively suggest a new convergence that would combine both Commons-oriented open peer production models with common ownership and governance models, such as those of the co-operatives and the solidarity economic models.

Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos

'Collaborative culture', 'mass creativity' and 'co-creation' appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and 'We-Think' (Leadbeater, 2007) argue collective culture to be the basis for digital commerce. This article analyzes the assumptions behind this Web 2.0 newspeak and unravels how business gurus try to argue the universal benefits of a democratized and collectivist digital space. They implicitly endorse a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely inside commodity culture. The logic of Wikinomics and 'We-Think' urgently begs for deconstruction, especially since it is increasingly steering mainstream cultural theory on digital culture.

OpenStreetMap: User-Generated Street Maps

The OpenStreetMap project is a knowledge collective that provides user-generated street maps. OSM follows the peer production model that created Wikipedia; its aim is to create a set of map data that's free to use, editable, and licensed under new copyright schemes. A considerable number of contributors edit the world map collaboratively using the OSM technical infrastructure, and a core group, estimated at approximately 40 volunteers, dedicate their time to creating and improving OSM's infrastructure, including maintaining the server, writing the core software that handles the transactions with the server, and creating cartographical outputs. There's also a growing community of software developers who develop software tools to make OSM data available for further use across different application domains, software platforms, and hardware devices. The OSM project's hub is the main OSM Web site.

Community Node-Based User Governance (CNBUG): Applying Craigslist's Techniques to Decentralized Internet Governance

In the Accountable Internet: Peer Production of Internet Governance, Cyberlaw-scholars Professors David R. Johnson, Susan P. Crawford, & John G. Palfrey Jr. suggest decentralized governance and user accountability as a means of governing the Internet. While advantageous over existing centralized models, Peer Production model also suffers from significant practical shortcomings that would make it unlikely to be adopted as a global means of Internet governance. A new model, Community Node-Based User Governance (CNBUG), inspired by Peer Production's decentralized model, consists of three principal components that establish its effectiveness: decentralized user-dependent governance, geographic nodal-centered communities, and quorum flagging, similar to that employed by Craigslist.org, an online community information Web site. These three components work together to establish a means of Internet governance that unlike its predecessors, does not chill speech or isolate users, integrates decision-making accountability, allows for the participation and integration of developing nations, represents global community standards, allows for concurrent online and territorial enforcement, and protects users from bad actors; all while preserving the Internet's fundamental purpose and nature, and also leaving intact its considerable business and technical infrastructure.

Competing information realities: Digital libraries, repositories, and the commons

Introduction and Scope Scholarly communication today faces unprecedented social and economic challenges coupled with the unbridled promises of new technologies that purport to solve many of its problems. Most of the problems are largely due to the serials price crisis in science, technology, and medicine, but others have also existed for awhile now such as tedious publication delays and criticism of the anonymous peer review process (Bachrach, et al, 1998; Mannheim, 2000). Facilitated by advances in information and communication technologies digital libraries at first (Schatz, et al, 1994; Atkinson, 1996; Harter, 1997), and more recently digital repositories (Atkinson, 2003; Barton, 2003 ) have emerged as alternative scholarly communication and publishing media. Heery and Anderson (2005) provide a review of digital repositories but very simply, digital repositories are unlike digital libraries such as Perseus, in that repositories provide a submission mechanism whereby scholars can deposit an electronic copy of their work at the time or soon after creation. Digital repositories are also called open access archives because of the lack of tolls, fees, or other legal and economic restrictions to access the content they make available (Ginsparg, 1996). For Lynch (2003), repositories are an essential infrastructure for scholarship in the digital age but for Tennant (2005) they merely collect “grey literature.” This situation is further exacerbated by references to the “commons” whose metaphorical meanings (like libraries and repositories) also range from the public domain to ideas far larger than that. Using the open source software model of knowledge production as a main example, Benkler (2002) argues for understanding modern information and knowledge production as a commons-based peer production model; this is also a view that makes sense when one considers the popularity of wikis or the global open access archives that have been operating in disciplines like high energy physics and computer science for more than a decade now. Even more interestingly, the Conservation Commons (2006) is using the idea of the commons to solve problems of biodiversity and the Science Commons (2006) is promoting the easing of barriers for scientific information of all types. The commons has enormous implications for research and teaching in the communities that make up the information sciences. Yet, the overwhelming majority of the ISI-ranked IS/LS journals today remain closed, there appears to be little innovation in our disciplinary scholarly communication system, there is only modest research from the information sciences community about the 'commons' and its potential for innovating information sciences research, including impact on digital libraries and digital repositories remains unexplored.