I think this is a fascinating discussion :)
What's at stake here? What do we gain or loose by calling something collaboration or
not doing so? I think part of what's at stake is the ease with which one can
generalize. When we say that work in Wikipedia (or Open Source) is collaboration we imply
that other work that we understand as collaboration can likely learn from Wikipedia.
It's somehow similar enough. If we say (for some reason) that a way of working is not
collaboration (or cooperation) then we somehow loose an easy, natural way to make these
justifications for research. We have to work a bit harder to make the argument but it
helps us be more specific about what might transfer (and what might not).
For example, if we accept the idea that some core-ish group are "collaborating"
then if we want to learn from Wikipedia for, say traditional virtual teams in
organizations, then we might argue that there is adequate similarity in terms of (say)
reciprocal interdependence, helping-behaviors or leadership. Conversely if we accept the
idea that the long-tail are working (pseudo)-stigmatically we face a choice: do we just
ignore them when we try to learn something transferable, or (more likely) seek to learn
something else. Say about how a combination of technology and task-design facilitates
such long-tail, stigmergic contributions? Thus learning less about managing
teams/teamwork and more about (re)-designing tasks/taskwork.
The second approach is what Kevin Crowston and I take in an article about open source that
is, we hope (!) coming out soon where we call this separate but collective work
"collaboration through open superposition" (working paper here
)
I'd be fascinated to hear how much (if any) of the thinking in there people think
applies to Wikipedia.
Cheers,
James
On Jul 23, 2012, at 7:54 PM, Kerry Raymond wrote:
My original point about walking together alone vs in a
crowd was to illustrate that the same data (the relative movements of the two people) can
have two different interpretations depending on context. I was trying to illustrate the
danger of quantitative analysis without validation from qualitative sources.
I was not presenting it as an example of collaboration or anything else. However, since
the topic has arisen, ...
I think there needs to be a shared goal for collaboration. Thus most WP editors are
“collaborating” because they have the shared goal of building a bigger and better
encyclopaedia (there are editors with other motivations – such as vandals, self-promoters,
etc) . I would agree that a crowd of people working down the street together is not a
collaboration, and that cooperation or coordination is a better term for it. However, the
distinction is not clear cut. Generally in life, our goals get broken into sub-goals. So,
your goal is to provide well for your family, so you decide you need a better paying job
(sub-goal), so you enrol in a Masters degree to upgrade your qualifications to get the
better job (sub-sub-goal), etc. So back to walking down the street in a crowd. We presume
that the goal of the people are mostly different, some are heading to the shops, others to
the train station, others to the office, etc. But this goal has a sub-goal of getting
safely to the end of the street, which requires us not to trip over one another. Are we
collaborating with respect to the goal of getting safely to the end of the street, but
cooperating/coordinating with respect of the different goals of going to the shops or the
office? There are infinite shades of grey in this regard; it depends on where you choose
to put the goal-posts (pun intended).
This is where stigmergy (the notion of collaboration without explicit communication but
with the ability to sense the environment) which makes a lot of sense when discussing
insects doesn’t translate well to people. This is because insects can’t talk and we
presume that the pheromone trails etc they leave on the environment are involuntary
side-effects of their actions (e.g finding food), which are then observed from the
environment by other insects. A human analogy would be leaving our footprints when we walk
along the sand or leaving fingerprints at a crime scene. Wikipedia is often described as
stigmergic collaboration because many editors are at work without a lot of explicit
communication (talk pages, email, IRC) to coordinate their activities. So what is the
environment through which WP stigmergy informs editors in the absence of explicit
communication? The general presumption is that it is the articles themselves, but I think
most of us would struggle with the notion that article edits are involuntary side-effects;
they seem quite deliberate actions by editors (apart perhaps for the typos!) with the
intention of communicating some information to the WP readership. Or to put it the other
way, everything about WP is deliberate communication, so the insect analogy breaks down.
So, any model of stigmergic collaboration in humans has to draw a line between what will
be regarded an explicit communication and what is sensing the environment (observing the
footprints in the sand). It’s just that the line is hard to draw as humans are highly
communicative creatures and everything about the WWW is communicative. Nonetheless we
might argue that recommender systems “people who bought this also bought that” on Amazon
creates new knowledge from observing an environment of purchases and are hence stigmergic.
Similar arguments apply to “price guides” based on ebay sales data etc. In which case we
would say that a WP article is stigmergic as it creates new body of knowledge from the
largely independent contributions of many editors and I think many editors do not read
talk pages or edit histories but simply look at the article and see something missing or
wrong and decide to fix that.
So I guess I am moving to the conclusion that while some of the most active &
dedicated WP editors are engaged in explicit communication in order to coordinate various
activities (not stigmergic), the long tail of editors is behaving stigmergically.
Kerry
From: wiki-research-l-bounces(a)lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:wiki-research-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of FT2
Sent: Tuesday, 24 July 2012 4:12 AM
To: jschneider(a)pobox.com; Research into Wikimedia content and communities
Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] Wikipedia's response to 2012 Aurora shooting
Walking down the street suggests different objectives and a sole criterion of "other
people not impacting my agenda".
What about when the common activity is a genuinely common agenda on the same object or
structure, such as painting a room, and participants' actions include seeing who's
doing what, adjusting your contribution or current activity to try and make it easy for
them, when you see them doing things and pass them tools or deal with the matters it's
clear they see as problems, in order that their area of focus is progressed and
faciliated, and when you can see the pattern they are painting in one area and you stop
yours to help theirs, identify what they're aiming for by their painting to date, and
you pick up another pot of paint to give them a hand in the places it's clear their
intention is to complete, and when you deliberately take time to build on or enhance their
initial outline by painting extra decorations within it, and watching to see if they like
it or not?
Then, I think, it can't be compared to the narrow activity of "ensure others
don't intrude on my intentions and otherwise complete indifference" as occurs
when people walk down the street.
FT2
On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Jodi Schneider
<jschneider@pobox.com<mailto:jschneider@pobox.com>> wrote:
This suggests distinguishing "coordination" and "collaboration". I
don't know of firm definitions of these.
Walking down the street avoiding bumping into others -- that is definitely
"coordination". Whether it's "collaboration" is (to me) less
clear.
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