Emergent Capabilities for Collaborative Teams in the Evolving Web Environment

This paper reports on our investigation of the latest advances for the Social Web, Web 2.0 and the Linked Data Web. These advances are discussed in terms of the latest capabilities that are available (or being made available) on the Web at the time of writing this paper. Such capabilities can be of significant benefit to teams, especially those comprised of multinational, geographically-dispersed team members. The specific context of coalition members in a rapidly formed diverse military context such as disaster relief or humanitarian aid is considered, where close working between non-government organisations and non-military teams will help to achieve results as quickly and efficiently as possible. The heterogeneity one finds in such teams, coupled with a lack of dedicated private network infrastructure, poses a number of challenges for collaboration, and the current paper represents an attempt to assess whether nascent Web-based capabilities can support such teams in terms of both their collaborative activities and their access to (and sharing of) information resources

Privacy in crowdsourcing:a systematic review

The advent of crowdsourcing has brought with it multiple privacy challenges. For example, essential monitoring activities, while necessary and unavoidable, also potentially compromise contributor privacy. We conducted an extensive literature review of the research related to the privacy aspects of crowdsourcing. Our investigation revealed interesting gender differences and also differences in terms of individual perceptions. We conclude by suggesting a number of future research directions.</p

A systematic literature review of the use of social media for business process management

In today’s expansion of new technologies, innovation is found necessary for organizations to be up to date with the latest management trends. Although organizations are increasingly using new technologies, opportunities still exist to achieve the nowadays essential omnichannel management strategy. More precisely, social media are opening a path for benefiting more from an organization’s process orientation. However, social media strategies are still an under-investigated field, especially when it comes to the research of social media use for the management and improvement of business processes or the internal way of working in organizations. By classifying a variety of articles, this study explores the evolution of social media implementation within the BPM discipline. We also provide avenues for future research and strategic implications for practitioners to use social media more comprehensively

Dynamics of conflicts in Wikipedia

In this work we study the dynamical features of editorial wars in Wikipedia (WP). Based on our previously established algorithm, we build up samples of controversial and peaceful articles and analyze the temporal characteristics of the activity in these samples. On short time scales, we show that there is a clear correspondence between conflict and burstiness of activity patterns, and that memory effects play an important role in controversies. On long time scales, we identify three distinct developmental patterns for the overall behavior of the articles. We are able to distinguish cases eventually leading to consensus from those cases where a compromise is far from achievable. Finally, we analyze discussion networks and conclude that edit wars are mainly fought by few editors only.Comment: Supporting information adde

Fostering Public Good Contributions with Symbolic Awards: A Large-Scale Natural Field Experiment at Wikipedia

This natural field experiment tests the effects of purely symbolic awards on volunteer retention in a public goods context. The experiment is conducted at Wikipedia, which faces declining editor retention rates, particularly among newcomers. Randomization assures that award receipt is orthogonal to previous performance. The analysis reveals that awards have a sizeable effect on newcomer retention, which persists over the four quarters following the initial intervention. This is noteworthy for indicating that awards for volunteers can be effective even if they have no impact on the volunteers’ future career opportunities. The awards are purely symbolic, and the status increment they produce is limited to the recipients’ pseudonymous online identities in a community they have just recently joined. The results can be explained by enhanced self-identification with the community, but they are also in line with recent findings on the role of status and reputation, recognition, and evaluation potential in online communities. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2016.2540 . This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics

Damage Detection and Mitigation in Open Collaboration Applications

Collaborative functionality is changing the way information is amassed, refined, and disseminated in online environments. A subclass of these systems characterized by open collaboration uniquely allow participants to *modify* content with low barriers-to-entry. A prominent example and our case study, English Wikipedia, exemplifies the vulnerabilities: 7%+ of its edits are blatantly unconstructive. Our measurement studies show this damage manifests in novel socio-technical forms, limiting the effectiveness of computational detection strategies from related domains. In turn this has made much mitigation the responsibility of a poorly organized and ill-routed human workforce. We aim to improve all facets of this incident response workflow. Complementing language based solutions we first develop content agnostic predictors of damage. We implicitly glean reputations for system entities and overcome sparse behavioral histories with a spatial reputation model combining evidence from multiple granularity. We also identify simple yet indicative metadata features that capture participatory dynamics and content maturation. When brought to bear over damage corpora our contributions: (1) advance benchmarks over a broad set of security issues ( vandalism ), (2) perform well in the first anti-spam specific approach, and (3) demonstrate their portability over diverse open collaboration use cases. Probabilities generated by our classifiers can also intelligently route human assets using prioritization schemes optimized for capture rate or impact minimization. Organizational primitives are introduced that improve workforce efficiency. The whole of these strategies are then implemented into a tool ( STiki ) that has been used to revert 350,000+ damaging instances from Wikipedia. These uses are analyzed to learn about human aspects of the edit review process, properties including scalability, motivation, and latency. Finally, we conclude by measuring practical impacts of work, discussing how to better integrate our solutions, and revealing outstanding vulnerabilities that speak to research challenges for open collaboration security

Good Authors = Good Articles? - How Wikis Work

Wikis are websites to develop content collaboratively. The question arises to what extent the reputation of participants influences the quality of wiki sites. We analyze the impact of author reputation using the example of Wikipedia. We extend previous research by considering a set of different reputation metrics and a new model for aggregating reputation values. Since anonymous authors tend to have a lower reputation, we also quantify the level of participation of anonymous authors as an indicator for the reputation of the crowd. Our analysis finds out that reputation matters, but strongly depends on the used reputation metric and therefore on the corresponding author characteristics. The study shows that the experience of authors in the development of high-quality articles is highly relevant whereas the number of edits and the quality of contributions are of lower importance. Finally, our investigation proves the open editing model and the self-healing mechanism of wikis