Social Capital in Online Temporary Organizations: Addressing Critical, Complex Tasks through Deliberation

Temporary organizations—small, task-focused, time-bound, agile groups—exist in mass collaborations to address tasks outside of existing procedures. Given that mass collaborations are informal and voluntary, this study explores the impact of social network attributes (cohesion and diversity) in temporary organizations on task completion. We suggest that participants’ prior shared experience and demonstrated knowledge of the larger organization in online temporary organizations, traits of cohesion, and working less often with the same people, evidence of diversity, lead to greater likelihood of successful task completion. Contrary to predictions, however, the less consistent the participant contributions, the lower the likelihood of successful task completion

Before the sense of ‘We’:identity work as a bridge from mass collaboration to group emergence

Abstract Individuals engaged in mass collaboration in Wikipedia may join to work recurrently with the same partners. It may well be that a significant portion of Wikipedia content is produced this way. Therefore, it is important to study how such groups emerge. In this paper, we argue how such recurrence may involve identity work that creates a sense of ‘we-ness.’ We provide a case from Wikipedia, focusing on how individual Wikipedians came together to work on a collaborative Feature Article task. Furthermore, the same people came together in other content collaborations, and they identified themselves as a group. The findings suggest that identity work can bridge mass collaborations to the emergence of smaller-scale sustained groups. Our theoretical contribution brings together research streams on mass collaboration, group dynamics, and identity. This offers interesting pathways for further research