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January 11, 2006

Catalyzing Collective Action on the Net

An interesting lecture on IT conversations by Microsoft Research sociologist Marc Smith.

Sociology provides insights into web communities, essentially collective action through computing. Keywords: "collective action dilemma theory", "interactive sociology", "social network theory", "social software".

What's the opposite of socializing? Getting work done? Well, a lot of getting work done is socializing, so, perhaps they aren't antonyms.

Online community is out (?) Isn't it nice to not answer the question "Is it really a community?" What about groups? Typically too small. Groups are two to eight, ten, twelve people. This 'communities' are 100,000 people.

Key Authors

• Bob Axelrod, Evolution of Cooperation, says we're all engaged in a game, playing risky transactions with each other over and over. The repitition that lets us be social and be successful being social. There is some math behind this called the prisoner's delimma.

• Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Humans are actually good at collective projects; we're only faced with a prisoner's delimma is we treat each other that way. We, in the US, have collectively lost sight of this. Individualism killed the hive? She says there are 7 or 8 things that can be used to fix this.

• Erving Goffman. How do we "do 'being social". By extension, how do we do being social on the net? How many pictures do I need to contribute to be in good standing?

• Edward Tufte, who says pictures really matter.

• Garrett Hardin, who says that all commons will fail because people will take advantage of each other. Perhaps not, not when the membership is large enough.

• Brian S Butler, The Quality of Online Social Relationships. What do we call these things? Are they online communities? Groups? How about voluntary organizations, like the Shriners. 80 to 90% contribute very little.

• What this sites become are virtual 'Shelling Points', a term borrowed from architecture. (Thomas Shelling). Places on a landscape where it seems obvious to meet other people engaged in certain kinds of behavior. One in a million? There's 768 of you on the internet and you can meet at the shelling point. And when we get together, we might even get something done!

• Paul Resnick, Yphrum's Law. Systems that shouldn't work, but do. Like Ebay. If I send money out, then sometimes something will come back. How do you make sure things come back more often? Reputation.

Back to Ostrom's 7 or 8 things:

• Group boundaries are clearly defined.

• Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.

• Most individuals affected by these rules and policies can participate in modifying the rules and policies.

• The rights of community members to devise their own practices is respected by external authorities.

• A system for monitoring a member's behavior exists; this monitoring is undertaken by the community members themselves.

• A graduated system of remediation is used.

• Community members have access to low-cost, conflict resolution mechanisms."

So there are two general methods for reputation. Graduated system of sanctions, and histories.

There are two things that happen to people when they look for one of this groups? They find to many, and can't tell one from another. When you are walking a city and it's dinner time, you follow rich information to your choice: the movement of other people, smells, colors, shapes, crowds, music.

Then there's a lot of stuff about usenet. Blah, blah. Here's the database report. The experiment appears to have been stopped gathering data in November 2005. More stuff about Marc's predictions of the future.

You can also read Daniel Steinberg's summary of this talk on the O'Reilly Network, and a summary at Julie's Blog.

Posted by Niels Olson at January 11, 2006 8:48 AM

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