Crowdsourcing motivations in a not-for-profit GLAM context : the Australian newspapers digitisation program

Crowdsourcing in recent times has become popular among not-for-profits as a means of eliciting members of the public to contribute to activities that would normally have been carried out by staff or by contracting external expertise. The GLAM (galleries, libraries, archives, museums) sector does have a history of involving online volunteers (e.g. reviewing books). Extending that tradition, some GLAM institutions are engaging in crowdsourcing projects to enhance and enrich their collections. But what motivates the public to participate in these crowdsourcing activities? Understanding the unique motivations of participants is needed to establish a motivational framework for GLAM organisations in their not-for-profit context. We present findings from a study of the motivational factors affecting participation in the Australian Newspapers Digitisation Program (ANDP) by the National Library of Australia (NLA). Based on motivational theories and frameworks the study shows that the participants are motivated by a complex framework of personal, collective and external factors. Participants were highly intrinsically motivated, but valued altruistic and community motivations as well. Community and external factors played a vital role in their continued involvement. The paper concludes with a conceptual framework of the motivational factors for crowdsourcing participants in a GLAM context based on the motivational dynamics observed in the ANDP case.<br /

A Sociability-based Theory of Solidarity

Notwithstanding the increasing interest that solidarity recently attracted in social, political, and moral philosophers, the foundations of a philosophical research field on solidarity have still to be laid. This thesis pursues the broad aim to contribute to this foundational work and is organized and structured accordingly. The substantive goal of the whole research project that unfolds henceforth is to reach a definition of the concept of solidarity, which is not intended to overcome or dismiss our everyday intuitions and commonsensical understandings of solidarity, but rather to make sense of what is underpinned by them. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In Chapter 1, I take the steps from Durkheim, who is by broad acknowledgment regarded as the pioneering theorist developing a systematic account of solidarity. The potentially original contribution of Chapter 1 is a conclusive focus on some questions that can be formulated out of Durkheim\u2019s framework and have been quite neglected by the commentators of his works. One of such open questions, that is, the extent to which anthropological assumptions on human nature \u336 and especially sociability \u336 may influence any theorization of solidarity, prepares the terrain for the subsequent development of the dissertation. Chapter 2 aims at shedding light on this intuition, which is elaborated in terms of an updated nomological reappraisal of human nature and a genuinely original concept that I propose, that is, the \uabanthropological load\ubb. By this concept, I mean a scalar property of social, ethical, and political concepts which indicates the extent to which the conceptual space for theorizing each of them is determined by anthropological assumptions. Following Durkheim\u2019s suggestion, I consider sociability as the most salient anthropological assumption for theorizing solidarity. Accordingly, at the end of Chapter 2, I present a possible strategy to frame the structure of the concept of sociability, that is, that of a dispositional and open cluster concept. Chapter 3 is intended to unpack some core features that compose the cluster of sociability, that is, capacity of self-categorization, the capacity of empathy, and capacity of being moved by prosocial motivation. For each of these features, it is proposed to adopt a definition borrowed from the pertinent scientific literature which will be selectively presented and discussed. To conclude, Chapter 4 takes the final and crucial step of the whole research project, that is, the definition of solidarity. The structure of this chapter is twofold. Firstly, I still present seven cases that are, at least intuitively, solidarity-evoking. In so doing, a phenomenological catalog of solidarity will be provided, wide enough to give a flavor of the pervasiveness of the phenomenon; the remainder of the chapter will be devoted to the question of whether all of these cases can be covered by a concept of solidarity, to be defined. The subsequent endeavor of defining solidarity, to be attempted in the second section, shall stick to the methodological guidance offered by Chapter 2. Thus, the definition of solidarity will be developed accordingly, that is, based on the sociability-related properties unpacked in Chapter 3

Social solidarity and Herbert Spencer: Not the oxymoron that might be assumed.

This article attempts to retrieve important aspects of Spencer's sociology from the general neglect and misrepresentation which threatens to overwhelm it all. It does touch in passing on many such highly dubious contentions as that he was a “social Darwinist,” but the prime focus is to deal with three linked themes. First, the article examines the significance of his attribution to individuals of “social self-consciousness” as part of sociality, thus distancing it from Durkheim's influential but suspect reading of Spencer's individuals as egoistic. Second, it rescues his concept of “the social organism” from misinterpretation. His own writings show it to be a more rigorous and suggestive attempt to configure the morphology of “the social” than commonly assumed. Third, it reconstructs the status of his contrast between “militant” and “industrial” social forms as a contrast between different but more general forms of social life that those descriptions in fact register. With the focus on these three linked themes the article improves the historical accuracy of our understanding of Spencer's sociology. It also repositions key aspects of it as not alien, quaint and a spent force, but ontologically challenging and possibly prescient for debates about the meaning of “the social” today

Postanarchisms: a critical assessment

Post-modernism has had a significant influence on anarchism, notably in the interrelation between the theoretical positions of libertarianism and post-structuralism (a set of theories and philosophies strongly identified with, but not identical to, post-modernism). This has generated a subset of anarchist thinking referred to as postanarchism. Postanarchism, like anarchism, is a fluid assemblage of political concepts that alters according to geographic and historical context. Within this chapter, some of its key theorists, principal terms, and some of the structures that coordinate its central principles, are identified and assessed. The chapter then concentrates on the apparent differences between postanarchism and more traditional anarchisms, arguing that rather than regarding postanarchism as a transcendence of anarchism, as some of its proponents maintain, it is more appropriate to regard postanarchism as representing a particular, historically specific constellation of practices, which consequently prioritizes particular discourses, agencies and tactics that are peculiar to these locations