Gabriel Mugar

Motivations for Sustained Participation in Crowdsourcing: Case Studies of Citizen Science on the Role of Talk

The paper explores the motivations of volunteers in a large crowd sourcing project and contributes to our understanding of the motivational factors that lead to deeper engagement beyond initial participation. Drawing on the theory of legitimate peripheral participation (LPP) and the literature on motivation in crowd sourcing, we analyze interview and trace data from a large citizen science project. The analyses identify ways in which the technical features of the projects may serve as motivational factors leading participants towards sustained participation. The results suggest volunteers first engage in activities to support knowledge acquisition and later share knowledge with other volunteers and finally increase participation in Talk through a punctuated process of role discovery.

Forming and norming social media adoption in the corporate sector

Social media increasingly pervade the business context. Despite the widespread fascination with the transformative capabilities of these tools, and an increased observability of online social media practices in the corporate sector, the adoption process at the organizational level as well as its consequences on policies and strategies are currently less understood. To ameliorate this gap, this study sets out to examine adoption patterns and their resulting organizational policies and strategies that influence or are influenced by specific adoption behaviors. In doing so, this study builds on findings of an interpretive case analysis, that integrates insights from various social media strategists, purposively selected from multiple industries. Guided by several technology adoption frameworks -- primarily Orlikowskis structurational analysis - three distinct pathways of social media adoption emerged from the data: (1) early adopters, (2) internal mavericks and (3) bandwagon jumpers. Each pathway is driven by either internal or external social behaviors, and leads to distinct organizational social media practices. Our data shows that existing organizational polices and norms mediate social media adoption practices while in turn, innovative adoption practices transform and influence the emergence of policies and norms in the form of a reflexive feedback mechanism.

Preserving the Margins: Supporting Creativity and Resistance on Digital Participatory Platforms

Online participatory platforms like Wikipedia and Zooniverse are designed to welcome contributions from anyone, however, to contend with a high volume of contributions, a range of constraints are deployed that align opportunities for participation toward ends defined by the experts and leaders of such platforms. In this paper I draw on extensive ethnographic work to describe how users encounter and negotiate opportunities for participation on two participatory platforms, demonstrating how platforms can exhibit distinct spaces and opportunities for participation, in some cases heavily enforcing standards of practice defined by experts and leaders while also leaving room for emergent and even divergent and deviant behavior. In describing this tension between conditions of normative and deviant participation, I highlight the importance of supporting opportunities for deviant and emergent participation to occur, emphasizing that design which uniquely supports narrow modes of participation can prevent opportunities for more inclusionary practice and evolving objectives.

A Practice Perspective on Websites for the Sharing Economy

The sharing economy describes an economic model in which people sell, share, or barter their skills or owned assets directly with others. This economy is facilitated primarily by websites that act as hubs for the visibility and transactions of local assets. Yochai Benkler notes that such peer-to-peer transactions are mediated not by market prices or organizational hierarchies, but by normative frameworks. The ways in which the normative frameworks are produced and perpetuated by transacting parties on the websites has yet to be studied by scholars. This paper proposes a practice perspective as a theoretical framework and Sense-Making as a methodology to explore how users interact with each other on the websites, so as to produce and sustain the normative frameworks critical to the success of the sharing economy.

Expanding the research scope for internet enabled neighborhood communication platforms

The value of an Internet Enabled Neighborhood Communication Platform (IENCP) is typically framed in research as a tool to increase the stock of social capital in a neighborhood. However, these studies are narrowly focused on the outcomes of the technology and provide little detail regarding the activity of expertise sharing and information behavior on such platforms. By limiting the focus to the outcomes, we risk fetishizing the technology and losing site of their socio-technical characteristics. The need to expand the research scope to understand the expertise sharing and information behavior on such platforms is greater than ever in the face of growing numbers of IENCPs across the world. If continued research on IENCP is to contribute to their design and management, a greater level of detail on how users share information on such platforms as well as where the platforms fit into users information seeking habits is required.