Howard T. Welser

Self-Governance Through Group Discussion in Wikipedia Measuring Deliberation in Online Groups

Virtual teams and other online groups can find it challenging to establish norms that allow them to effectively balance task and relational aspects of their discussions. Yet, in our reliance on organizational and team theories, small group scholars have overlooked the potential for learning from examples offered by online communities. Theories of deliberation in small groups offer scholars a way to assess such discussion-centered self-governance in online groups. The study operationalizes the conceptual definition of deliberative discussion offered by Gastil and Black (2008) to examine the small group discussions that undergird policy-making processes in a well-established online community, Wikipedia. Content analysis shows that these discussions demonstrated a relatively high level of problem analysis and providing of information, but results were mixed in the group’s demonstration of respect, consideration, and mutual comprehension. Network visualizations reveal structural patterns that can be useful in examining equality, influence, and group member roles. The combination of measures has implications for future research in deliberative discussion and virtual teamwork.

Whither the Experts? Social Affordances and the Cultivation of Experts in Community Q&A Systems

Community based Question and Answer systems have been promoted as web 2.0 solutions to the problem of finding expert knowledge. This promise depends on systems’ capacity to attract and sustain experts capable of offering high quality, factual answers. Content analysis of dedicated contributors’ messages in the Live QnA system found: (1) few contributors who focused on providing technical answers (2) a preponderance of attention paid to opinion and discussion, especially in non-technical threads. This paucity of experts raises an important general question: how do the social affordances of a site alter the ecology of roles found there? Using insights from recent research in online community, we generate a series of expectations about how social affordances are likely to alter the role ecology of online systems.

Wiki Networks: Connections of Creativity and Collaboration

A wiki is a web site anyone can edit, where each modification to each page is recorded and archived. Because of their flexible structure, support for discussion, and ease of use, wikis are becoming an increasingly popular platform for supporting online communities. The core of the chapter introduces three example inquiries employing NodeXL to address three different types of questions in wiki systems. The first example studies a set of wiki pages at the Empire Wiki that are related by the Castle Project, and it seeks to identify different types of contributors to that project based on both their network attributes and key variables related to the types of pages they do, and do not, edit. Understanding and identifying different types of contributors is useful because it can help web administrators locate highly valuable contributors of different types and figure out whose participation should be encouraged, rewarded, or, in some cases, discouraged or redirected. The second example examines the quality of online discussion on the “talk” pages associated with a particular project on Wikipedia. This research study illustrates the use of content analysis to measure both edges and vertex attributes. NodeXL is used to visualize patterns in the discussion, identify high-quality contributors, and locate problematic interactions where the discussion is not helping the group achieve its task. The third study illustrates strategies for revealing large-scale structure of editing patterns in wikis, drawing on data from Lostpedia. The analysis illustrates the use of affiliation networks and large-scale analysis for exploration of an entire wiki, providing a means for making sense of hundreds of thousands of edits and participants.

Power-use in cooperative competition: A power-dependence model and an empirical test of network structure and geographic mobility

Although the social exchange paradigm has produced a vibrant research program, the theoretical tradition is rarely used to model the structure of social networks outside of experiments and simulations. To address this limitation, we derive power-dependence predictions about network structure and geographic mobility-the outcomes of power-use-and test these predictions using complete data on competition networks and travel schedules among amateur sports teams. Poisson regression and exponential random graph models provide strong support for our predictions. The findings illustrate exchange dynamics in which status resources desired by teams, coupled with the availability of geographically proximal alternatives, create power and dependence that dictate where and with whom teams compete. Although evidence supports Georg Simmels classic proposition that networks form on the basis of values and propinquity, we show that this complex dynamic is conditional on power and dependence. We conclude by discussing implications and directions for future research.

Breaking the Iron Law of Oligarchy: Computational Institutions, Organizational Fidelity, and Distributed Social Control

More than 100 years ago, Robert Michels (1911) observed that even organizations based on the strongest democratic principles tend to devolve into oligarchy. Leaders will use their authority to serve their own interests, they will cultivate loyalty with a small clique of elites, and they will subvert the mission of the organization. This corruption from the top arises due to the seemingly inescapable concentration of organizational power, hierarchy, and asymmetries in the capacity to monitor and sanction. During the intervening century the widespread misuse of authority across diverse formal organizations has largely proven Michel correct. However, we are no longer limited by the organizational systems of the nineteenth century nor by constraints of face-to-face interaction. Partial examples of alternative organizational structures can be identified among effective contemporary firms, online communities, and large scale collaborative projects. This chapter describes the organizational challenge in terms of the principal-agent problem and identifies the set of attributes necessary for distributed social control in computational institutions. This set of attributes forms an ideal type for identifying problems inherent in extant organizations and for identifying features that can be integrated from current online systems of interaction. In conclusion, this chapter advocates for researchers and designers to propose, develop, and to implement systems that will allow organizations to break the iron law of oligarchy.