A Model of and for Virtual Projects

We examine how digital technologies enable distributed actors to collaborate asynchronously on virtual projects. We use Wikipedia and associated wiki digital technology as the research site for our exploration. Our probe of the emergence of Wikipedia articles highlights a distinctive property of such digital technologies: in their very use, they generate a digital trace. This digital trace serves as a generative memory that facilitates ongoing cocreation, justification, and materialization of contributions from distributed actors. We examine the implications of such processes for virtual projects that embrace digital technologies with properties similar to the wiki technology used in Wikipedia