[OWW-SC] Massive Voluntary Collaboration (seminar today)

[Ilya Sytchev]

This may be of interest to people located in Boston:

Mon Apr 23, 4-5:30pm
3 Cambridge Center, MIT Building NE20, Room 336 Conference Room
Kevin Crowston, Syracuse University

The Internet has facilitated the emergence of a new era of human
collaboration. Trends in usage of open source software, web-logs
(commonly called blogs), so called wikis (websites that allow
contributors to add their own content), and user forums facilitate
combinations of online community space, tools for creating information
resources, and new modes of coordinated effort among contributors which
we call massive voluntary collaboration (MVC). In my talk, I will
describe a model to shed light on the developmental arc of participation
in MVC. This model integrates four converging perspectives from the
social movements, cooperation, voluntarism and Communities of Practice
literatures. This model regards MVC as a developmental arc of
participation in which contributors engage in activities to share
knowledge and learn about specific topics of their choice. This
integrated theory brings an important complement to existing models of
collaboration and explains distributed voluntary cooperation.

http://cci.mit.edu/SeminarsSpring07.html