Personal Communication Networks and Their Positive Effects on Online Collaboration and Outcome Quality on Wikipedia

Online collaborative projects have been utilized in a variety of ways over the past decade, such as bringing people together to build open source software or developing the world\u27s largest free encyclopedia. Personal communication networks as a feature do not exist in all collaborative projects. It is currently unclear if a designer\u27s decision to include a personal communication network in a collaborative project\u27s structure affects outcome quality. In this study, I investigated Wikipedia\u27s personal communication network and analyzed which Wikipedia editors are utilizing it and how they are connected to outcome quality. Evidence suggests that people who utilize these networks are more experienced in editing high quality articles and are more integrated in the community. Additionally, these individuals utilize the personal communication network for coordinating and perhaps mentoring editors who edit lower quality articles. The value of these networks is demonstrated by the characteristics of the users who use them. These findings indicate that designers of online collaborative projects can help improve the quality of outcomes in these projects by deciding to implement a personal communication network in their communities

Eight Observations and 24 Research Questions About Open Source Projects: Illuminating New Realities

The rapid acceleration of corporate engagement with open source projects is drawing out new ways for CSCW researchers to consider the dynamics of these projects. Research must now consider the complex ecosystems within which open source projects are situated, including issues of for-profit motivations, brokering foundations, and corporate collaboration. Localized project considerations cannot reveal broader workings of an open source ecosystem, yet much empirical work is constrained to a local context. In response, we present eight observations from our eight-year engaged field study about the changing nature of open source projects. We ground these observations through 24 research questions that serve as primers to spark research ideas in this new reality of open source projects. This paper contributes to CSCW in social and crowd computing by delivering a rich and fresh look at corporately-engaged open source projects with a call for renewed focus and research into newly emergent areas of interest

Technologically Mediated Discourse and Information Exchange through Medium Specific Syntactical Features: The 2012 Presidential Election on Twitter

Political discourse has been historically constrained by geographic proximity of participants. The introduction of the Internet and specifically social media has altered these geographic constraints and political discourse is now one of the most prevalent activities in social media. The increasing use of technology to acquire political information and participate in the political process in the United States creates a gap between what is understood about political activity in a democratic society and the specific technological features people use. As more individuals begin to use technology for political activity, understanding how the technology is used becomes increasingly important. Previous research exploring political discourse on social media has focused on one discrete event or a narrow time period. This narrow focus limits the understanding of the complex environment that comprises an election. This study takes a longitudinal approach and uses network analysis, co-occurrence analysis and temporal frequency analysis to examine a 53 million Twitter message (tweet) corpus collected during the 2012 Presidential Election (August 20, 2012 - November 13, 2012) to understand how individuals use Twitter to engage in political discourse. The queries used to compose the dataset were theoretically informed based on democratic theory and previous socio-technical research. This study makes three contributions to the existing literature. First, this study identifies that individuals use syntactical features differently in the context of an acute event such as a debate. Second, this study indicates that, although candidates and media are the most talked about and talked to, these interactions elicit no response. Third, this study reveals that information shared through URLs was predominantly user-generated content from Twitter and mass media information suggesting a reflexive information-sharing environment. This study illustrates that even with the availability of the numerous technological and syntactical features to facilitate interactions and share information, there is still a limited realization of the promise that technologies such as Twitter afford. Instead of fundamentally changing the political discourse process by having individuals use it for two-way communication, Twitter amplifies the existing political environment where there is limited cohesive discourse and communication is one-way.Ph.D., Information Studies -- Drexel University, 201