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Internet-Based Collaborations and Their Political Significance

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Abstract

In recent years, we have witnessed the notable accomplishments of numerous Internet-based large-scale collaborations, which typically rely on small contributions by many participants. In the first part of the paper we highlight the political relevance and significance of such collaborations, and we argue that Internet-based collaboration is turning into an important organizing principle for the production of a variety of goods by a range of political actors. In the second part, we analyze why the Internet is conducive for such collaborations and we focus on a number of factors, most significantly on the reduced costs of both individual contributions and the social organization of production, and on the large and excessive number of potential contributors attracted to focal collaborations.

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... The idea of groups organizing in the absence of large, formal organizations has become a popular preoccupation among academic researchers as a result of the remarkable successes of projects like the development of the Linux operating system and the popular encyclopedia project hosted at Wikipedia.com, which are made possible by the development of cheap communication and workflow management tools that can be accessed by individuals located anywhere (Shirky, 2009;Karpf 2010bKarpf , 2011Lev-On & Hardin, 2008). These projects have seen large groups of individuals seemingly spontaneously organizing to produce complex goods, and have raised the idea of open source politics, which is the notion of citizens spontaneously and without central leadership forming groups to achieve complex political goals -social movements without the social movement organizations (Karpf, 2010b(Karpf, , 2011Kreiss, 2010;Lev-On & Hardin, 2008). ...
... which are made possible by the development of cheap communication and workflow management tools that can be accessed by individuals located anywhere (Shirky, 2009;Karpf 2010bKarpf , 2011Lev-On & Hardin, 2008). These projects have seen large groups of individuals seemingly spontaneously organizing to produce complex goods, and have raised the idea of open source politics, which is the notion of citizens spontaneously and without central leadership forming groups to achieve complex political goals -social movements without the social movement organizations (Karpf, 2010b(Karpf, , 2011Kreiss, 2010;Lev-On & Hardin, 2008). ...
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... Note that different social media projects demand varying skills and investments from contributors (Lev-On and Hardin, 2007; See also Brabham, 2008): ...
... Still, many such projects are based on contributions by individuals without prior acquaintance, and with no expectations of future interactions. Such massive-scale projects succeed in spite of the near-absence of interaction amongst contributors; inter-member communication is not a key generator of such collective actions (see Lev-On and Hardin, 2007). ...
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... 1 The chapter is an abbreviated and revised version of Lev-On and Hardin (2007). 2 For current data, see www.boincstats.com. ...
... For a more comprehensive discussion, seeLev-On and Hardin (2007). ...
Article
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... Many studies demonstrate that social media have become major tools for entrepreneurs and activists. For example, they provide meeting places for activists for various causes; enable rapid and extensive top-down and bottom-up information flows, from opinion leaders to activists and vice versa; and supplement mobilization and recruitment efforts (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012;Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2005;Lev-On, 2012;Lev-On & Hardin, 2008;Lev-On & Steinfeld, in press;Shirky, 2008). ...
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Numerous studies address the uses and perceived effects of social media, but a scholarly void exists about how it is framed in the mainstream media. This study fills this void using a content analysis of news items that included references to social media in Israel’s six daily Hebrew-language printed newspapers during the Israel–Gaza war (2014). The papers framed social media primarily as spaces of hate speech and distribution of rumors. Additional salient themes referred to social media as alternative media channels by politicians and celebrities and as arenas of public diplomacy. Social media was rarely portrayed as platforms to orchestrate collective action or to meet the enemy.
... Many studies demonstrate that social media have become major tools for entrepreneurs and activists. For example, they provide meeting places for activists for various causes; enable rapid and extensive top-down and bottom-up information flows, from opinion leaders to activists and vice versa; and supplement mobilization and recruitment efforts (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012;Bimber, Flanagin, & Stohl, 2005;Lev-On, 2012;Lev-On & Hardin, 2008;Lev-On & Steinfeld, in press;Shirky, 2008). ...
Article
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Numerous studies address the uses and perceived effects of social media, but a scholarly void exists about how it is framed in the mainstream media. This study fills this void using a content analysis of news items that included references to social media in Israel’s six daily Hebrew-language printed newspapers during the Israel–Gaza war (2014). The papers framed social media primarily as spaces of hate speech and distribution of rumors. Additional salient themes referred to social media as alternative media channels by politicians and celebrities and as arenas of public diplomacy. Social media was rarely portrayed as platforms to orchestrate collective action or to meet the enemy.
... This study aims at refining our understanding of the perceived role of the Internet in general, and of social media in particular, for activism. The literature illustrates the numerous advantages offered by the Internet for activists and social movements, such as providing 'focal points' for initial organization, information dissemination (Lev-On and Hardin, 2007;Ayres, 1999;Hussain and Howard, 2013;Margetts et al., 2015), recruitment and mobilization (Garrett, 2006;Van Aelst and Walgrave, 2002) and even coordination between various groups to and form ad hoc coalitions (Bennett, 2003). However, leading stakeholders' beliefs about social media's role during a social movement, the relations between online social media and mainstream media during protests, and the ability to promote central versus peripheral causes through online tools, have remained underexplored. ...
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... Whereas administrative bodies have been slow to respond to these changing communication channels (Mergel, 2013), the opposite holds true for activists and social entrepreneurs. With low participation costs and access to potential constituents, it is often argued that the Internet may be most effective for promoting their goals (Hussain & Howard, 2013;Lev-On & Hardin, 2007;Norris, 2002). And indeed, the Internet has emerged as a major tool for activists and social movements (Bennett, 2003;Cammaerts, 2012;Carty, 2010;Garrett, 2006;Hussain & Howard, 2013). ...
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... ‫תנאים‬ -‫פרטיות‬ ‫הודעה‬ ‫הפרטיות‬ ‫בהצהרת‬ ‫כמפורט‬ ,‫שונות‬ ‫למטרות‬ [Cookies] ‫בעוגיות‬ ‫משתמש‬ ‫זה‬ ‫אתר‬19.4.2019‫הישראלי‬ ‫האינטרנט‬ ‫איגוד‬ -‫איתן‬ ‫צוק‬ ‫במבצע‬ ‫המרכזית‬ ‫בעיתונות‬ ‫פייסבוק‬ ‫מסגור‬ ?‫חברתית‬ ‫הלא‬ ‫הרשת‬https://www.isoc.org.il/internet-il/articles-and-research/magazine/non-social-network-framing-facebook-mainstream-press 26/27.25.07.2014 ,10 '‫עמ‬ ,‫הארץ‬ ,"‫בטוחים‬ ‫לא‬ ‫בפייסבוק‬ ?‫הסתה‬ ‫זאת‬ ‫כולם‬ ‫"שימותו‬ ,‫לוצקי‬ ‫דפנה‬[21].22 .25.07.2014 ,16 '‫עמ‬ ,‫סופשבוע‬ ‫מעריב‬ ,"‫בוערים‬ ‫"סטטוסים‬ ,‫לוי-וינריב‬ ‫ואלה‬ ‫גולדנברג‬ ‫רועי‬[22].23 .25.07.2014 ,16 '‫עמ‬ ,‫ימים‬ 7 -‫אחרונות‬ ‫ידיעות‬ "?‫יותר‬ ‫מפחד‬ ‫"מי‬ ,‫שקד‬ ‫רענן‬[23].24 ...
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הרשתות החברתיות המקוונות הן מציאות יום-יומית בחייהם של מאות מיליוני בני אדם ברחבי העולם. אולם קיים ריק מחקרי בנוגע לאופני הייצוג של הרשתות החברתיות בתקשורת המרכזית. המחקר הנוכחי ממלא ריק זה באמצעות ניתוח תוכן כמותי של האייטמים החדשותיים אשר כללו התייחסות לרשתות החברתיות ופורסמו בששת העיתונים המודפסים בישראל במהלך מבצע צוק איתן בקיץ 2014. מניתוח התוכן עולה שהעיתונות מסגרה את הרשתות החברתיות בראש ובראשונה כמרחבים להבעת דעה וזירות שיח, ובעיקר כפלטפורמה לשיח שנאה והפצת שמועות ומידע לא מאומת. תמות בולטות נוספות הציגו את הרשתות החברתיות כערוצי תקשורת אלטרנטיביים מצד פוליטיקאים וסלבריטאים המתקשרים באמצעותן ישירות עם קהליהם, וכזירות דיפלומטיה ציבורית. בניגוד למחקרים קודמים שבהם נבדקו מסגורים תקשורתיים של הרשתות החברתיות, במחקר הנוכחי נמצאו ייצוגים מועטים בלבד של הרשתות החברתיות ככלים לארגון פעולה קולקטיבית ולהיכרות עם האחר
... Recent developments in crowdsourcing and idea-sharing software have harnessed the potential of large scale collaborations (e.g.; Wikipedia, Stackoverflow), but have not yet solved the problem of online text based discussions (Lev-on and Hardin 2008). All this software was not designed with the specific purpose of promoting good deliberation, thus it is not surprising that it does not achieve such outcome. ...
... The research on the cognitive aspects of online communities of practice focuses on the various motivations to contribute information [7,10,11,15]. Yet, although motivations to contribute information have been investigated in depth, there are no prospective studies that analyzed the content of communities of practice to learn whether cognitive uses are indeed central in terms of the content uploaded to the communities. ...
Chapter
Full-text available
This study examines whether interactions between members of communities of practice typically have cognitive or social character. Content analysis of more than 7000 posts, automatic words frequencies analyses as well as interviews with community members demonstrate that the interactions between members of the Israeli Ministry of Social Affairs’ communities of practice, the subject of the present study, emphasize the cognitive rather than social aspects. This emphasis is reflected in the content of posts, the avoidance from discussing personal cases or offering emotional support and more. The findings are particularly interesting given the nature of these communities as a space for social workers whose work requires and is characterized by a high degree of social and emotional interactions.
... The amount of shared knowledge in these communities, its flow and its uses, are therefore important aspects of the community experience of users. Research about the cognitive aspects of the online community experience mainly examines the motivations for contributing information (Lev-On and Hardin, 2007;Kankanhalli et al., 2005;Ma and Agarwal, 2007;Wasko and Faraj, 2005). ...
Article
Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present findings from a large-scale study which examined the uses and gratifications of communities of practice of the Israeli Ministry of Social Services. Design/methodology/approach – A twofold research methodology was applied: content analysis of 7,248 posts, as well as 71 semi-structured interviews with community members. Findings – Cognitive uses were perceived by community members as the key uses and gratifications from the communities of practice. The implications of these uses and gratifications, such as the de-isolation of isolated workers and personal empowerment, are studied. Originality/value – Contrary to much recent literature, the study presents the communities not mainly as platforms for social relations or emotional support, but rather as exchange platforms where information is transmitted between providers and consumers to the benefit of all community members.
... As noted in the introduction, some writers speculate on how widespread use of the internet could affect Olson's thesis, particularly in terms of reducing the costs of coordinating and participating in collective action (Bimber, 2001(Bimber, , 2003(Bimber, , 2005Klotz, 2004;Krueger, 2002;Lev-on andHardin, 2007, Lupia andSin, 2003). But most pertinently for our purposes, Lupia and Sin (2003) discuss noticeability, its inverse relationship with group size and the possible effect of the internet's capacity to provide social information as a form of coercion. ...
... Thirdly, citizen-driven political blogs constitute an aphysical conversational and deliberational arena where Web users can independently engage in multidirectional discussions, share information and build issue-oriented transient social networks. In some cases, they can have politically-oriented educational and mobilizatory effects on the public and ultimately lead to increased levels of formal and informal political engagement (Siapera 2008;Gil de Zúñiga 2009;Lev-On and Hardin 2008;Skoric, et al. 2009;Farrell, et al. 2008). Finally, citizen-driven political blogs constitute a flexible media channel that can potentially foster the development and the strengthening of two-way communication bridges between members of the citizenry and the formal political sphere (Siapera 2008;Woodly 2008;Coleman and Wright 2008). ...
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The increasing adoption of blogs by Internet users during the last seven years, has contributed to the restructuration of the online political mediascape in many national contexts. Based on an analysis of the socio-political behavioural profile of French-speaking Quebec political bloggers in the spring of 2008, this article provides an assessment of the multidimensional challenges and opportunities linked to the constitution of social media research samples through non-probabilistic viral or decentralized strategies. More specifically, it argues for the development of more methodologically-rigorous quantitative and qualitative investigation approaches that can deal with the constantly-evolving structural and functional particularities of the Web 2.0 political media environment. This is especially relevant considering the rising popularity of blogs, social networking services (SNS) and other Web 2.0 tools as objects of research among the international scientific community
... These communication practices lend support to a number of recent inquiries into the networked organization and structure of the netroots as the source of its scale and capacity for social and symbolic action as a movement. For example, a number of scholars (Benkler & Shaw, 2010;Lawrence, Sides, & Farrell, 2010) have argued that the netroots is both densely interlinked and has informational elites that serve as ''organizational hubs'' (Lev-On & Hardin, 2008) that concentrate resources and attention, facilitating collective action. ...
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Full-text available
Purpose – The purpose of this study is to analyze how campaigns, movements, new media outlets, and professional journalism organizations interact to produce political discourse in an information environment characterized by new actors and increasingly fragmented audiences. Design – To do so, this chapter offers a rare inside look at contemporary strategic campaign communications from the perspective of staffers. Twenty-one open-ended and semi-structured interviews were conducted with former staffers, consultants, and vendors to the 2008 Obama campaign. Findings – During the primaries the Obama campaign worked to create and cultivate ties with activists in the mediated “netroots” movement, what Todd Gitlin has referred to as the “movement wing of the Democratic Party.” The campaign sought to influence the debate among the principals and participants in this movement, given that they play an increasingly central role in the Democratic Party networks that help shape the outcome of contested primaries. During the general election, when the campaign and its movement allies shared the goal of defeating the Republicans, sites in the netroots functioned as important conduits of strategic and often anonymous campaign communications to new specialized journalistic outlets and the professional, general interest press. It is argued that campaigns and movements have extended established and developed new communication tactics to pursue their goals in a networked information environment. Implications – This chapter's contribution lies in showing how much of what scholars assume to be the communicative content of amateurs is often the result of coordination among organized, and often hybrid, political actors.
... Note that recently there have been some suggestions for collaborative classification of documents, where users generate keywords that are associated with individual sites. Tagging content collaboratively is an instance of what I elsewhere call second-order collaborations (On and Hardin 2007), and is increasingly used in a variety of websites. 4 The ill-classification of the online 'database' makes it difficult for the 'intermediary' (whether a search engine or otherwise) to locate relevant content. ...
Chapter
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In this paper I highlight two implications of the widespread use of search engines, which are often overlooked by commentators. In the first part of the paper I argue that search engines are conducive to unplanned exposures to diverse and even opposing views. In the second part I argue that search engines indirectly contribute to emergent political organization, since they allow large numbers of people to locate and access organizational hubs of collective action. I conclude by pointing to the democratic significance of these properties.
... Olson's truism, however, is being updated in ways that fail to recognize that the old constraints on collective action are less of a factor (Esteban & Ray, 2001). If Olson's logic of collective action is a less viable theory, the rising role of electronic grassroots lobbying may prove to be one of the key reasons (Lev-On & Hardin, 2007;Davis, Elin, & Reeher, 2002). Twenty-first century studies of interest groups must start with the assumption of reduced organizing costs and shifting incentives as opportunities for laptop and hand-held participation multiply. ...
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Large-scale e-mail campaigns are a staple in the modern environmental movement. Interest groups increasingly use online mobilizations as a way to raise awareness, money, and membership. There are legitimate political, economic, and organizational reasons for doing so, but these gains may come at the expense of a more substantial and efficacious role for citizens who wish to use e-mail to engage in public participation. This paper situates a close examination of the 1000 longest modified MoveOn. Org-generated e-mails sent to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) about its 2004 mercury rulemaking, in the broader context of online grassroots lobbying. The findings indicate that only a tiny portion of these public comments constitute potentially relevant new information for the EPA to consider. The vast majority of Move On comments are either exact duplicates of a two-sentence form letter, or they are variants of a small number of broad claims about the inadequacy of the proposed rule. This paper argues that norms, rules, and tools will emerge to deal with the burden imposed by these communications. More broadly, it raises doubts about the notion that online public participation is a harbinger of a more deliberative and democratic era.
Chapter
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קהילות מקוונות עשויות לשמש מוקדי גיוס לפעולה, לחשיפת מידע, לצמיחת כוכבים ואף ליצירת קבוצות מיקוד לצורך ניבוי מגמות עתידיות. עם זאת, צמיחתן של הקהילות המקוונות מעלה חששות חדשים מפני קיטוב והקצנה חברתיים ופוליטיים. פרק זה הינו פרק מבוא לספר "קהילות מקוונות", והוא מגדיר ומאפיין את הקהילות המקוונות ומציג את פרקי הספר האחרים.
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במסגרת המאמר אבחן ואנתח את שימושי האינטרנט ההשתתפותיים בזמן מלחמת לבנון השנייה. אסכם את המאמר בדיון בממצאים ובהמלצות לגבי אופנים לניצול יתרונותיו של האינטרנט לגיוס הציבור ולהנעתו בשעת חירום. מתוך סדרת "התקשורת במלחמת לבנון 2006" של מכון הרצוג
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ספר זה מציג לראשונה בשפה העברית מגוון מחקרים מדיסציפלינות שונות הנוגעים להשפעת טכנולוגיות הרישות והמידע, ובייחוד רשת האינטרנט – על הספֶרה הפוליטית, החברתית והכלכלית.
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Digital media and online social networking applications have changed the way in which dissent is organized with social movement leaders using online applications and digital content systems to organize collective action, activate local protest groups, network with international social movements and share their political perspectives. In the past, authoritarian regimes could control broadcast media in times of political crisis by destroying newsprint supplies, seizing radio and television stations, and blocking phone calls. It is much more difficult to control media in the digital age though there have certainly been occasions when states have successfully shut down their digital networks. What causes state-powers to block internet access, disable digital networks or even shut off internet access? How is it done, what is the impact and how do dissidents attempt to fight back? In this timely and accessible volume a collection of high profile, international scholars answer these key questions using cases from Israel, Iran, Russia, Morocco, Vietnam and Kuwait and assess the political economy of the actors, institutions and regimes involved and effected by the state-management and control of digital networks. © Muzammil M. Hussain and Philip N. Howard 2013. All rights reserved.
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Digital media and online social networking applications have changed the way in which dissent is organized with social movement leaders using online applications and digital content systems to organize collective action, activate local protest groups, network with international social movements and share their political perspectives. In the past, authoritarian regimes could control broadcast media in times of political crisis by destroying newsprint supplies, seizing radio and television stations, and blocking phone calls. It is much more difficult to control media in the digital age though there have certainly been occasions when states have successfully shut down their digital networks. What causes state-powers to block internet access, disable digital networks or even shut off internet access? How is it done, what is the impact and how do dissidents attempt to fight back? In this timely and accessible volume a collection of high profile, international scholars answer these key questions using cases from Israel, Iran, Russia, Morocco, Vietnam and Kuwait and assess the political economy of the actors, institutions and regimes involved and effected by the state-management and control of digital networks. © Muzammil M. Hussain and Philip N. Howard 2013. All rights reserved.
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The sweeping and extensive penetration of the Internet generates endless possibilities for emergent associations and exchange. Engendering trust may be critical to enabling agents to gain from such exchange; for example, trust can assist in overcoming dilemmas related to multinational organizations, global virtual teams, auction and barter sites, house exchange sites, peer-to-peer file swapping sites, and on and on (Iacono and Weisband 1997; Jarvenpaa and Leidner 1999; Kirkman et al. 2002). The formation and continuance of trust online, however, runs into obstacles that jeopardize the fulfillment of the great potentials of the Internet for mutually beneficial exchange (see Nissenbaum 2004; Dutton and Shepherd 2003; Ben-Ner and Putterman 2003.) The logic of repetition and expectation of future exchange is a primary generator of trust in everyday life (Hardin 2002). But online exchanges are often singular, and may not be supported by thick relationships, geographic proximity, or FtF (face-to-face) interaction between agents. The formation of local norms can engender cooperation as well (Cook and Hardin 2001), but online spaces are often normatively thin. Without trust the great potential of the Internet for exchange may be jeopardized, crowding out entrepreneurs and traders. This chapter explores the possibilities of generating trust and cooperation online, and looks at mechanisms that emerge to overcome risk and facilitate cooperation. Following Harvey James (2002), I distinguish between two methods of managing trust problems. One is generating trust by altering agents' expectations about the future behavior of others, without institutional intervention and leaving agents' vulnerability intact. A second approach involves establishing institutions that alter the strategic setting, transforming the problem of trust into one about the competence of third parties. The distinction between trust-based cooperation and cooperation without trust frames the rest of this chapter.
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This chapter introduces the Global-Health Impact Labels (GHILs), which are a form of accreditation awarded to corporations that have made significant impact on global health. Though the idea is not without its criticisms, it can at least be implemented in the medical tourism industry in order to alleviate brain drain concerns in developing countries.
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המחקר עוסק באפשרויות השימוש ברשת האינטרנט להתעוררות של התארגנויות חברה אזרחית, תוך התמקדות באתר קטיף.נט. אף שמדובר באתר בבעלות ובתחזוקה פרטית, קטיף. נט הפך בעיני תושבי גוש קטיף ובעיני "הציבור הכתום" ככלל, לאתר המזוהה ביותר עם המאבק כנגד תכנית ההינתקות בעבר, ולאחריה - כזירה מרכזית להתמודדות המפונים עם מצבם החדש. במקביל לתיעוד השימושים באתר טרם ההינתקות, נבדקה באמצעות סקר מקוון, תפיסת משתמשי האתר את השימוש בו כפלטפורמה לפעילות קיבוצית ולשימור קשרים חברתיים. במחקר נמצא, בין היתר, שמשתמשי האתר רואים בו כלי מרכזי למטרות חברתיות, פוליטיות ותעסוקתיות כאחת, ושקיימת תחושת קהילתיות משמעותית בקרב משתמשי האתר.
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Was ist falsch am Web 2.0? Unter anderem, so könnte man antworten, die daran geknüpfte Erwartung einer massenhaften Zusammenarbeit zur Bereitstellung nutzergenerierter Inhalte, welche enorme Potentiale für einzelne Teilnehmer sowie für Kollektive, für Unternehmen und ganze Volkswirtschaften mit sich bringe (vgl. Levine [1995] 2000). Zur Beschreibung solcher Vorgänge wurden Schlagworte wie „swarm creativity“ (Gloor 2006) oder „wikinomics“ (Tapscott/Williams 2006) geprägt. Die technischen und sozialen Veränderungen im und um das Web 2.0 beförderten, so die populäre Behauptung, die „wisdom of the crowds“ (Surowiecki 2004) bzw. die „power of mass creativity“ (Leadbeater 2008).
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This article considers the emergence of large-scale “commons-based peer production” projects such as Wikipedia.org from an institutional development perspective. The argument it makes is threefold. First, that that the lowered transaction costs and information abundance found online transform a subset of public goods problems, essentially replacing free ridership with mass coordination as the central challenge. Second, that the boundaries of this subset are defined by a “power law topology” that leads to the emergence of online hub spaces and serves to resolve search problems endemic to the anti-geographic online landscape. These boundary conditions limit the overall impact of commons-based peer production for the political space. Third, that all such hubs move through a common five-stage institutional development process, directly related to standard models of the diffusion of innovation. Identification of the institutional development process behind Wikipedia leads in turn to the stipulation of seven hypotheses: the “Field of Dreams” Fallacy, the “Interest Horizons” thesis, “Political Strategy is Not Like Computer Code,” the “Location-based Wave” thesis, “Power Law Fragility Under Moore's Law,” the “Punctuated Equilibrium” thesis, and “Code-Forking the Public Sphere.” Each thesis holds direct implications for the potential and limitations of “open source” applications in the political arena.
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Former residents of the evacuated Gush Katif region, once parts of closely-knit and cohesive communities, have been spread across Israel in temporary settlements since the disengagement (2005). The goal of this study is to learn how the evacuees interact with one another to organize politically and to retain their social capital, focusing on Katif.net, the major Internet site in use by the former residents of Gush Katif. This is an unusual case of a virtual community that continues to thrive online even as its offline predecessor has been evacuated.
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Web users' primary access points are shifting from desktops and laptops to ubiquitous mobile devices. This leads to more diverse assessment data and will enable new forms of collective activity.
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In recent years the future of foreign policy in the post-Cold War era has been widely and hotly debated. The debates have included discussion of the future of the nation-state, of the appropriate principles to guide foreign policy and of the implications for international relations of the rapid expansion of international informational infrastructures. For the most part these discussions have come to focus on how to renovate the foreign policy apparatus to make it more effective in the emerging new era. The focus derives from a defacto consensus that assumes that while there is an ongoing, gradual expansion in the responsibilities and powers of supranational institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the European Union (EU), and while sub-national actors such as state and even municipal governments or non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are playing a larger role on the international scene, the nation-state will continue to be the primary international actor and thus in need of "foreign" policy. Given the history of modern capitalist society, such expectations seem reasonable; they may, however, be increasingly disappointed. In recent years, the dominance of nation state over the relationships between people in one country with those in others has been challenged from below by direct cross-border communications and collaborations, facilitated by the Internet. This challenge grew exponentially in the wake of the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico in January 1994 and their organization of an International Encounter Against Neoliberalism and for Humanity in the summer of 1996. The mobilization of support for that indigenous uprising in over 40 countries around the world and the post-Encounter creation of new, bottom-up means of communication such as Indymedia are dramatically increasing the ease with which people can organize outside of, and often against, the plans of national governments. This paper was prepared for a special issue of the Journal of International Affairs on technology and foreign affairs.
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This article investigates two examples ofcitizen cyber-organizing in the context ofthe literatures on social capital and organizing. It asks, What can cyber-organizations teach us about the current state of social capital? What are the implications ofcyber -organizing for the context ofpublic administration? What implications do cyber-organizations hold for the role of the public administrator? The author concludes that the continuous communication ofparticipants in cyber-organizations, as well as their transitory and informal roles and rules, their social and emotional support, and their development of a shared understanding of the issues they face function as forms of social capital that facilitate civic engagement. Furthermore, cyber-organizations add to the fragmented and fluid social and political environment confronting public administration. Finally, to realize the potential power and significance of cyberorganizing, public administrators should begin to see such organizations through a lens that is different fromthe professional orientation to interest groups that has pervaded the field. Public administrators must reimagine themselves as agents of the social bond.
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Many observers doubt the capacity of digital media to change the political game. The rise of a transnational activism that is aimed beyond states and directly at corporations, trade and development regimes offers a fruitful area for understanding how communication practices can help create a new politics. The Internet is implicated in the new global activism far beyond merely reducing the costs of communication, or transcending the geographical and temporal barriers associated with other communication media. Various uses of the Internet and digital media facilitate the loosely structured networks, the weak identity ties, and the patterns of issue and demonstration organizing that define a new global protest politics. Analysis of various cases shows how digital network configurations can facilitate: permanent campaigns; the growth of broad networks despite relatively weak social identity and ideology ties; transformation of individual member organizations and whole networks; and the capacity to communicate messages from desktops to television screens. The same qualities that make these communication-based politics durable also make them vulnerable to problems of control, decision-making and collective identity.
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Internet newsgroups allow individuals to interact with others in a relatively anonymous fashion and thereby provide individuals with concealable stigmatized identities a place to belong not otherwise available. Thus, membership in these groups should become an important part of identity. Study 1 found that members of newsgroups dealing with marginalized–concealable identities modified their newsgroup behavior on the basis of reactions of other members, unlike members of marginalized–conspicuous or mainstream newsgroups. This increase in identity importance from newsgroup participation was shown in both Study 2 (marginalized sexual identities) and Study 3 (marginalized ideological identities) to lead to greater self-acceptance, as well as coming out about the secret identity to family and friends. Results supported the view that Internet groups obey general principles of social group functioning and have real-life consequences for the individual. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
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this paper examines these relationships in more detail, and asks whether contributions, perceived benefits, and the relationships among them were different for owners of the lists (formal leaders), active posters, and lurkers of the groups, and for nonwork-related and work related groups. To test our hypotheses, we conducted repeated measures ANOVAs with respondent role (owner or other member) and group type (non-work or work-related) as fixed effects, and group size and content volume as covariates. Building 18 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 1 . T o t a l T i m e 1 . 0 0 2. Infrastructure Maintenance . 6 8 * * 1 . 0 0 3. Social Control .29** .28** 1.00 4. Social Encouragement .42** .29** .47** 1.00 5. External Promotion .31** .33** .29** .32** 1.00 6. Content Provision .87** .65** .29** .36** .28** 1.00 7. Audience Engagement .39** .11* .12* .16** .06 . 24** 1.00 9. Information Benefits .16** .05 -.10 .13* .00 .06 .15** .24** 1.00 10. Social Benefits .33** .17** .20** .35** .22** .28** .17** .30** .30** 1.00 11. Altruistic Benefits .28** .23** .10 .34** .15** .26** .13* .32** .28** .49** 1.00 12. Work-Related Group -.06 .07 -.09 .04 -.02 -.03 -.02 .28** .08 -.12* .09 1.00 13. Log (Group Size) -.01 -.11 -.02 .02 -.09 -.11* .10 .07 .20** -.08 -.05 .17** 1.00 14. Log (Message Volume + .01) .19** -.04 .08 .13* -.03 .08 .13* .06 .21** .08 .09 -.18** .52** 1.00 15. # of Members Known Outside the Group .14** .20** .06 .08 .07 .31** -.01 .06 -.06 .02 .12* .05 -.07 .01 Pairwise Ns range from 325 to 385 * p <= 0.05; ** p <= 0.01 Table 3: Correlations among measures 19 RESULTS A premise of this research is that community building requires significant expenditures of time and effort on the part of members. The descriptive analysis presented below shows that members reported inv...
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Claims about the Web and politics have commonly confounded two different things: retrievability and visibility, the large universe of pages that could theoretically be ac-cessed versus those that citizens are most likely to encounter. While the governing assumption of much previous work has been that retrievability would translate in-exorably into visibility, we cast doubt on that claim. Drawing on a large literature in computer science that ties a site's visibility to the number of inbound hyperlinks it receives, this paper proposes a new methodology for measuring the link structure surrounding political Web sites. Our technique involves iterative, extremely large-scale crawls away from political sites easily accessible through popular online search tools, and it uses sophisticated automated methods to categorize site content. In every community we examine, we find that a small handful of Web sites dominate. Online political communities on the Web thus seem to function as "winners take all" networks, a fact that would seem to have widespread implications for politics in the digital age.
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The rise of bloggers raises the vexing question of why blogs have any influence at all, given their relatively low readership and lack of central organization. We argue that to answer this question we need to focus on two key factors—the unequal distribution of readers across weblogs, and the relatively high readership of blogs among journalists and other political elites. The unequal distribution of readership, combined with internal norms and linking practices allows interesting news and opinions to rise to the “top” of the blogosphere, and thus to the attention of elite actors, whose understanding of politics may be changed by frames adopted from the blogosphere.
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Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The “private investment” model assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The “collective action” model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenon of open source software development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software. In this paper, we propose that open source software development is an exemplar of a compound “private-collective” model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models and can offer society the “best of both worlds” under many conditions. We describe a new set of research questions this model raises for scholars in organization science. We offer some details regarding the types of data available for open source projects in order to ease access for researchers who are unfamiliar with these, and also offer some advice on conducting empirical studies on open source software development processes.
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Currently, two models of innovation are prevalent in organization science. The "private investment" model assumes returns to the innovator result from private goods and efficient regimes of intellectual property protection. The "collective action" model assumes that under conditions of market failure, innovators collaborate in order to produce a public good. The phenomenon of open source software development shows that users program to solve their own as well as shared technical problems, and freely reveal their innovations without appropriating private returns from selling the software. In this paper, we propose that open source software development is an exemplar of a compound "private-collective" model of innovation that contains elements of both the private investment and the collective action models and can offer society the "best of both worlds" under many conditions. We describe a new set of research questions this model raises for scholars in organization science. We offer some details regarding the types of data available for open source projects in order to ease access for researchers who are unfamiliar with these, and also offer some advice on conducting empirical studies on open source software development processes.
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Systems as diverse as genetic networks or the World Wide Web are best described as networks with complex topology. A common property of many large networks is that the vertex connectivities follow a scale-free power-law distribution. This feature was found to be a consequence of two generic mech-anisms: (i) networks expand continuously by the addition of new vertices, and (ii) new vertices attach preferentially to sites that are already well connected. A model based on these two ingredients reproduces the observed stationary scale-free distributions, which indicates that the development of large networks is governed by robust self-organizing phenomena that go beyond the particulars of the individual systems.
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The success of the Linux operating system has demonstrated the viability of open-source software, an alternative form of software development that challenges traditional assumptions about software markets. Understanding why developers participate in open-source projects is crucial for assessing the impact of open-source software. Their motivations fall into two broad categories: internal factors (e.g., intrinsic motivation, altruism) and external rewards (e.g., expected future returns, personal needs). The results of a survey administered to open-source programmers are summarized.
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The reward and communication systems of science are considered.
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This Essay offers a framework to explain large-scale effective practices of sharing private, excludable goods. It starts with case studies of carpooling and distributed computing as motivating problems. It then suggests a definition for shareable goods as goods that are "lumpy" and "mid-grained" in size, and explains why goods with these characteristics will have systematic overcapacity relative to the requirements of their owners. The Essay next uses comparative transaction costs analysis, focused on information characteristics in particular, combined with an analysis of diversity of motivations, to suggest when social sharing will be better that secondary markets at reallocating this overcapacity to nonowners who require the functionality. The Essay concludes with broader observations about the attractiveness of sharing as a modality of economic production as compared to markets and to hierarchies such as firms and government. These observations include a particular emphasis on sharing practices among individuals who are strangers or weakly related; sharing's relationship to technological change; and some implications for contemporary policy choices regarding wireless regulation, intellectual property, and communications network design.
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It seemed like such a good idea-a treaty that would lower barriers to foreign investment, just like the GATT had liberalized international trade. Instead, the Multilateral Agreement on Investment became a lightning rod for opposition to the global economy and turned the World Wide Web into a virtual battleground.
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From the Publisher: Digital Divide examines access and use of the Internet in 179 nations world-wide. A global divide is evident between industrialized and developing societies. A social divide is apparent between rich and poor within each nation. Within the online community, evidence for a democratic divide is emerging between those who do and do not use Internet resources to engage and participate in public life. Part I outlines the theoretical debate between cyber-optimists who see the Internet as the great leveler. Part II examines the virtual political system and the way that representative institutions have responded to new opportunities on the Internet. Part III analyzes how the public has responded to these opportunities in Europe and the United States and develops the civic engagement model to explain patterns of participation via the Internet.
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We propose an improved theoretical approach to the rich variety of collective action now present in public life. Toward this end, we advance a conception of collective action as communicative in nature, and offer a two-dimensional model of collective action space, comprising dimensions for (a) the mode of interpersonal interaction and (b) the mode of engagement that shapes interaction. We illustrate the perspective by describing the location of a variety of contemporary collective action groups within it and by an explication of the space that reveals its utility for making sense of modern collective action efforts. Specifically, we apply the collective action space to illustrate the changing presence of collective action groups over time, deviations in collective action groups through changes in size, shape, and location, and variations in the experiences and motivations of people engaged in collective action efforts. Finally, we show how our communicative approach to collective action can integrate the insights of several theoretical traditions, including collective action theory, social capital theory, and aspects of organization theory.
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Review of The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age / by Pekka Himanen, with a prologue by Linus Torvalds and an epilogue by Manuel Castells. Random House, 2001, ISBN 0375505660
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In this article we will suggest that print and related traditional media have been used more successfully in constituting a public sphere than in supporting more private and localized forms of community building (Habermas 1989; Stone 1991). The costs and control of print media, in addition to the stability of the content, have reduced the applicability of these media to the improvisatory and quotidian social processes that groups use to help keep themselves cohesive. In contrast, computer-based interactions have been and are being used extensively to support many of the informal interactions and related activities necessary to communities, giving members new tools for negotiating and rehearsing public forms of group life (Jones 1995). We hope to show how the public aspirations and problems of social groups shape their encounters with computers and encourage them to use computer interaction to manage their public representations.
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According to its proponents, open source style software development has the capacity to compete successfully, and perhaps in many cases displace, traditional commercial development methods. In order to begin investigating such claims, we examine data from two major open source projects, the Apache web server and the Mozilla browser. By using email archives of source code change history and problem reports we quantify aspects of developer participation, core team size, code ownership, productivity, defect density, and problem resolution intervals for these OSS projects. We develop several hypotheses by comparing the Apache project with several commercial projects. We then test and refine several of these hypotheses, based on an analysis of Mozilla data. We conclude with thoughts about the prospects for high-performance commercial/open source process hybrids.
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There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open source projects is initially startling. This paper makes a preliminary exploration of the economics of open source software. We highlight the extent to which labor economics, especially the literature on 'career concerns', and industrial organization theory can explain many of these projects' features. We conclude by listing interesting research questions related to open source software.
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The notion of "capital" suggests a resource that can be accumulated and whose availability allows people to create value for themselves or others. People can do more when they have access to physical resources like buildings and tools, which are usually referred to as "physical capital". Money, or "financial capital", allows people to acquire many other kinds of resources. In the latter half of the 20th century, economists began to think about education as "human capital". People who have more knowledge and skills can produce more, so it makes sense to think about spending on education as a form of investment rather than consumption [1]. Productive resources can reside not just in things and in people, but also in social relations among people [2, 3]. Following Coleman [2], I define "social capital" as productive resources that inhere in social relations. In order to give the concept greater specificity, analysts sometimes restrict the definition to particular kinds of social relations, such as networks of interpersonal communication, trust, and intimacy, or widespread social trust,, or norms of reciprocity. Equating social capital with any particular pattern of social relations, however, would make it impossible to identify as social capital any new patterns of social relations.
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This article begins by outlining John Locke's concept of global civil society and how it is embodied in the global non-governmental movements for peace, human rights, social justice, and environmental preservation and sustainability. The article then sum marizes the role that new globe-girdling communications technologies are now playing within the NGO movements and describes the emergence of one global computer network known as the Association for Progressive Communications (APC) which links more than 15.000 NGO computers in 95 countries. As one case in this dramatic trend, the paper then examines North American Free Trade Agreement, a market- and government-imposed plan to unite the economies of Mexico, the United States, and Canada.
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Collective action theory, which is widely applied to explain human phenomena in which public goods are at stake, traditionally rests on at least two main tenets: that individuals confront discrete decisions about free riding and that formal organization is central to locating and contacting potential participants in collective action, motivating them, and coordinating their actions. Recent uses of technologies of information and communication for collective action appear in some instances to violate these two tenets. In order to explain these, we reconceptualize collective action as a phenomenon of boundary crossing between private and public domains. We show how a reconceptualized theory of collective action can better account for certain contemporary phenomena, and we situate traditional collective action theory as a special case of our expanded theory.
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Open source software has risen to prominence within the last decade, largely due to the success of well known projects such as the GNU/Linux operating system and the Apache web server, amongst others. Their significant commercial impact, with GNU/Linux reportedly running on 25% of server machines and Apache on 60% of web servers, has prompted many companies who use and who develop software to reassess their traditional modes of functioning. A number of companies such as IBM, HP and Sun have invested significantly in developing open source software. Much early written work on open source software development aimed at raising awareness and advocating its uptake. More recently the interest has been in quantifying and qualifying the advantages, disadvantages and other features of open source software. This paper aims to contribute in this second area. Most work on open source implicitly treats all projects as equivalent, for want of ways of classifying them. Benefits of 'typical' projects are claimed, with little attention to what constitutes a 'typical' project. In this paper we look at data available on SourceForge, a web site hosting upward of 30,000 open source projects and characterise the distribution of projects. Considering the number of downloads per week of the software, we show that for the most part the data follows a Pareto type distribution i.e. there are a small number of exceptionally popular projects, most projects being much less popular, and the number of projects with more than a given number of downloads tails off exponentially. We offer explanations for this distribution and for the places where the actual distribution deviates from the model and propose ways that these explanations could be tested. In particular there seem to be fewer than expected projects with a small number of weekly downloads. Likely explanations for this would seem to be either that projects with a small number of downloads per week do not tend to use SourceForge, or that this small number of downloads indicates a low level of interest in the project and such projects are inherently unstable (either they die or become more popular). Two practical applications of this work are: it is useful for people or companies starting an Open Source project to have an idea of what a 'typical' project might entail; secondly, it enables analysis of best practice and benefits to be tied to some sort of classification of projects and allows questions such as how benefits scale with project size to be examined
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The Chiapas uprising of 1994 rallied an international community of supporters, largely organized through activities on the Internet, that provided an example of the possi- bilities and limitations of the Net as a tool for social movements. This article models the Internet as a form of rhizome: an intermediate and contested social space composed of flows that transcend boundaries and forge new connections between events and places. The suc- cess of Internet organizing in southern Mexico is due to the constant and reciprocal connec- tions between cyberspace and other social spaces, which avoided the restriction of events to a contained space and scale. Keywords: cyberspace, Mexico, social movements, Zapatistas.
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Howard Dean's presidential bid was notable for many things, including the mixed reaction it drew from political scientists. Many scholars found Dean's ultimate failure predictable. Longstanding political science wisdom suggests several explanations for Dean's defeat: the central issue of electability, which seemed to weigh heavily against his campaign; the fact that primary voters are more moderate than party activists; the well-documented difficulty of regaining lost momentum. Less systematic factors—such as numerous verbal gaffes and one infamous scream—surely contributed as well. © 2005, American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.
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To provide a comprehensive evaluation of the internet in American democracy, Bruce Bimber sets the contemporary information revolution in historical context, asserting that past developments in American history offer important lessons for understanding how the internet is affecting politics. He examines how citizens and organizations use it for political purposes and is especially interested as to whether new technology is making Americans more engaged in their government. This study about the internet and politics combines historical and survey analysis with case studies of political events.
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In this paper we report on the results of a study of the effort and motivations of individuals to contributing to the creation of Free/Open Source software. We used a Web-based survey, administered to 684 software developers in 287 F/OSS projects, to learn what lies behind the effort put into such projects. Academic theorizing on individual motivations for participating in F/OSS projects has posited that external motivational factors in the form of extrinsic benefits (e.g.: better jobs, career advancement) are the main drivers of effort. We find in contrast, that enjoyment-based intrinsic motivation, namely how creative a person feels when working on the project, is the strongest and most pervasive driver. We also find that user need, intellectual stimulation derived from writing code, and improving programming skills are top motivators for project participation. A majority of our respondents are skilled and experienced professionals working in IT-related jobs, with approximately 40 percent being paid to participate in the F/OSS project.