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The afterlife of 'living deliverables': angels or zombies?
Within the STELLAR project, we provide the possibility to use living documents for the collaborative writing work on deliverables. Compared to 'normal' deliverables, 'living' deliverables come into existence much earlier than their delivery deadline and are expected to 'live on' after their official delivery to the European Commission. They are expected to foster collaboration. Within this contribution we investigate, how these deliverables have been used over the first 16 months of the project. We therefore propose a set of new analysis methods facilitating social network analysis on publicly available revision history data. With this instrumentarium, we critically look at whether the living deliverables have been successfully used for collaboration and whether their 'afterlife' beyond the contractual deadline had turned them into 'zombies' (still visible, but no or little live editing activities). The results show that the observed deliverables show signs of life, but often in connection with a topical change and in conjunction with changes in the pattern of collaboration
Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions
What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of
relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a
test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational
structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict
among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace
structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a
computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of
conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize
the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction
of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions
taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no
statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of
particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news
events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being
driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of
belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing
predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase,
and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we
observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the
system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting
available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state
machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm
Wikipedia as an encyclopaedia of life
In his 2003 essay E O Wilson outlined his vision for an “encyclopaedia of life” comprising “an electronic page for each species of organism on Earth”, each page containing “the scientific name of the species, a pictorial or genomic presentation of the primary type specimen on which its name is based, and a summary of its diagnostic traits.” Although the “quiet revolution” in biodiversity informatics has generated numerous online resources, including some directly inspired by Wilson's essay (e.g., "http://ispecies.org":http://ispecies.org, "http://www.eol.org":http://www.eol.org), we are still some way from the goal of having available online all relevant information about a species, such as its taxonomy, evolutionary history, genomics, morphology, ecology, and behaviour. While the biodiversity community has been developing a plethora of databases, some with overlapping goals and duplicated content, Wikipedia has been slowly growing to the point where it now has over 100,000 pages on biological taxa. My goal in this essay is to explore the idea that, largely independent of the efforts of biodiversity informatics and well-funded international efforts, Wikipedia ("http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page":http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) has emerged as potentially the best platform for fulfilling E O Wilson’s vision
From Social Simulation to Integrative System Design
As the recent financial crisis showed, today there is a strong need to gain
"ecological perspective" of all relevant interactions in
socio-economic-techno-environmental systems. For this, we suggested to set-up a
network of Centers for integrative systems design, which shall be able to run
all potentially relevant scenarios, identify causality chains, explore feedback
and cascading effects for a number of model variants, and determine the
reliability of their implications (given the validity of the underlying
models). They will be able to detect possible negative side effect of policy
decisions, before they occur. The Centers belonging to this network of
Integrative Systems Design Centers would be focused on a particular field, but
they would be part of an attempt to eventually cover all relevant areas of
society and economy and integrate them within a "Living Earth Simulator". The
results of all research activities of such Centers would be turned into
informative input for political Decision Arenas. For example, Crisis
Observatories (for financial instabilities, shortages of resources,
environmental change, conflict, spreading of diseases, etc.) would be connected
with such Decision Arenas for the purpose of visualization, in order to make
complex interdependencies understandable to scientists, decision-makers, and
the general public.Comment: 34 pages, Visioneer White Paper, see http://www.visioneer.ethz.c
Alternatives to Author-Centric Knowledge Organization
This article explores the differences between collaborative and collective authorship, focusing on the most obvious example of the latter, the Internet, and the challenges it poses for knowledge organization. An alternative to current author-centric knowledge systems is presented in the experimental Quanta system
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