This link has been bookmarked by 26 people . It was first bookmarked on 07 Apr 2006, by michelemmartin.
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10 May 10
Giorgio BertiniRheingold has described interaction in one online community as consisting of a gift economy, in which help and information is offered without the expectation of any direct, immediate quid-pro-quo. Even in more anonymous settings there is a surprising amou
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14 Oct 08
Trudy LaneThe most famous example of this two-person situation is called the Prisoner’s Dilemma and there is a huge amount of research devoted to it. One of the most important studies of the Prisoners Dilemma is Axelrod’s (1984) book on the Evolution of Cooperation. Axelrod identifies three conditions that are necessary for even the possibility of cooperation. In other words, without these three elements there is little or no hope that cooperative relationships will emerge and persist.
3 conditions:
The first condition is that it must be likely that two individuals will meet again in the future. The first condition is that it must be likely that two individuals will meet again in the future.gift economy reputation economy cooperation motivation participation
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Rheingold (1993) has described interaction in one online community (the WELL) as consisting of a gift economy,
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anticipated reciprocity
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Indeed, some observers (Wellman & Gulia 1997; Rheingold 1993) have reported that individuals who regularly offer advice and information seem to receive more help more quickly when they ask for something.
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one's reputation.
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sense of efficacy,
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30 Sep 08
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25 May 08
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03 Mar 08
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02 Oct 07
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20 Sep 07
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06 Sep 07
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MOTIVATIONS FOR CONTRIBUTING
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18 Aug 07
Alberto CotticaSaggio di Kollock sulla cooperazione online. Citato da Wikipedia
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07 Aug 07
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10 Jun 07
mohamad al afghaniWhat is a gift? Carrier (1991, p. 122) expands on the classic work by Mauss (1935) to define a gift as (1) the obligatory transfer, (2) of inalienable objects or services, (3) between related and mutually obligated transactors.
academic collaboration internet economics transparency information
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12 Apr 07
michelemmartinYet the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all. Given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to i
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For a student of social order, what needs to be explained is not the amount of conflict but the great amount of sharing and cooperation that does occur in online communities.
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interaction in one online community (the WELL) as consisting of a gift economy, in which help and information is offered without the expectation of any direct, immediate quid-pro-quo. Even in more anonymous settings, such as Usenet discussion groups, there is a surprising amount of free help and information given out, often to complete strangers whom one may never meet again.
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Why would anyone give away such valuable advice? What can explain the amount of cooperation that does occur in online communities? In this chapter I wish to analyze how the economies of cooperation change as one moves to the Internet. I argue that there are fundamental features of online interaction which change the costs and benefits of social action in dramatic ways.
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define a gift as (1) the obligatory transfer, (2) of inalienable objects or services, (3) between related and mutually obligated transactors.
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a gift transaction involves a diffuse and usually unstated obligation to repay the gift at some future time. Gift exchanges should not involve explicit bargaining or demands that the gift be reciprocated, but a relationship in which there is only giving and no receiving is unlikely to last. The contrast to a gift exchange is a commodity transaction, in which no obligation exists after the exchange is consummated – the bottle of water purchased at a convenience store does not create an obligation to buy something there again. A gift is also tied in an inalienable way to the giver. This is to say that gifts are unique: it is not simply a sweater, but rather the sweater-that-Bill-gave-me. In contrast, commodities are not unique and derive no special value having been acquired from person X rather than person Y – a pound of flour is a pound of flour is a pound of flour when purchased at a supermarket. Finally, gifts are exchanged between individuals who are part of an ongoing interdependent relationship. In a commodities transaction, the individuals are self-interested, independent actors (Carrier 1991).
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f course, if a certain motivation turns out to be especially significant in people's decision to cooperate, then the structural features that encourage this motivation will be particularly important. For example, if most people contribute information and advice because they anticipate receiving information at a later point in time, then well defined group boundaries will be particularly important because a successful generalized exchange system requires a reasonable stable population.
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Thus, as remarkable as the products of online cooperation and collaboration have been, it may be that for the most part we have been picking the “lowest hanging fruit” – supplying interesting digital goods that can be provided by single individuals while ignoring duller, more complex, but no less useful public goods.
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In this case one contributes to the group because that is what is best for the group – individual and collective outcomes are thus merged and there is no social dilemma. However, complete devotion to a group is rare. It is much more likely that even if an individual feels an attachment to the group, it will be moderated by other desires and the price of helping the group. A literal altruist – who works for the good of others without any regard to self – is very rare indeed. However, to the extent that a person feels an attachment to the community, their contributions will likely be increased to the extent that the goals of the community are developed, clearly articulated, and communicated to the members.
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Yet the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all. Given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to impose monetary or physical sanctions on someone, it is striking that the Internet is not literally a war of all against all.
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(4) making sure contributions are visible and that contributors are recognized for the efforts, and (5) well defined and defended group boundaries. To make a broad statement, to the extent an online community lacks each of these features, we can expect that cooperation and collective action will be less likely
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Although a number of different motivations for contributing to a public good were discussed, three structural features are common in many of the cases and can be regarded as the basic features required of any successful online community. These features are: (1) ongoing interaction, (2) identity persistence, and (3) knowledge of previous interactions. If members of a group will not meet each other in the future, if there is no stability in the names and identities that people adopt, and if there is no memory or community record of previous interaction, it will be very difficult to create and maintain a cooperative online community. [15]
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As one zoomed in on the map to view a particular neighborhood, any of the dots representing schools could be selected. This brought up a web page for the school that provided basic information and allowed one to sign up as a volunteer, organizer, or sponsor. Volunteers entered personal information onto an online form and listed the skills they had as well as any additional comments. Once volunteers signed up, they were automatically added to a list on the school's page. Their names, e-mail addresses, skills, and comments were listed. Online sign-up forms were also available for those who wished to be sponsors or organizers for the event. Sponsors were responsible for purchasing the wiring kits that each school would need and for providing technical assistance. Online descriptions of the wiring kits and order forms were also provided on the site so that ordering the kit for the school could be done as easily and quickly as possible. Organizers were responsible for contacting the school, contacting the registered volunteers, and arranging a meeting of the volunteers prior to NetDay.
Thus, the school web pages made it easy for volunteers to see what help was needed, to sign up, to contact the school and other volunteers, to inform the school and other volunteers of their skills and experience, and to keep up-to-date on organization efforts. Further, all of this was accomplished in a decentralized way without any staff.
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he arrangement creates an incentive structure in which programmers are encouraged to contribute modifications to the program because they are assured that everyone will have access to their contributions and that they will have access to any modifications other people have made, either currently or in the future. This helps create a healthy generalized exchange system.
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The second feature suggests that the intrinsic interest and challenge of the project can be important. If people find the task interesting and useful for themselves, then the production of the larger public good must deal with issues of coordination but not motivation: the project was interesting for many programmers and they were helping to develop something that would be personally useful to them. Indeed, as programmers began to contribute code to the project, their contributions were often directed at making the operating system useful for themselves (e.g., writing device drivers for the operating system so that they could use hardware and peripherals that were of interest to them). Once these subprograms were developed, it was very easy to share the work with the entire Linux community because of the extremely low costs of posting and distributing the information.
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(b) You need to have a project that many programmers feel is interesting: this does not seem to be the case with a lot of the application programs.
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(a) Somebody (usually one person) wrote the basic program to the state where it was already usable. The net community then takes over and refines and fixes problems, resulting in a much better program than the original, but the important part is to get it started (and channeling the development some way). The net works a bit like a committee: you'll need a few dedicated persons who do most of the stuff or nothing will get done.
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Here we see the reduction in communication and coordination costs that were mentioned above – online interaction made it easy to send in comments and suggestions and to keep everyone who was interested up-to-date on the current state of the program. Torvalds flatly states in an interview that “without net access, the project would never have even gotten off the ground” (Torvalds 1993).
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One of the points made by Torvalds and others was the ability of the Internet to facilitate collaboration.
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Someone may need to write a particular computer program for her own use with no thought to anything other than solving her particular problem at hand. Having written the program, the costs of now sharing and distributing it with others may be near zero: she can simply post it in an appropriate discussion group or other online community. Here again, the ease with which this can be done, and the manifold benefits it might have for others and for herself, mean that that the fruits of one's private workshop can be distributed to the world.
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More generally, an additional possible motivation is the attachment or commitment one can have to the group.
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For none of these three motivations do we need to assume that the individual is altruistic – simple self-interest is enough. However, it may sometime be the case that an individual values (at least to some degree) the outcomes of others. In this case a fourth possible motivation is need, that is, one may produce and contribute a public good for the simple reason that a person or the groups as a whole has a need for it.
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making regular and high-quality contribution to the group can help a person believe she has an impact on the group and support her own self-image as an efficacious perso
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A third possible motivation is that a person contributes valuable information because the act results in a sense of efficacy, that is, a sense that she has some effect on this environment.
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Thus, gift economies are driven by social relations while commodity economies are driven by price
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effect of contributions on one's reputation.
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f the population of a group is extremely unstable, then there is the temptation to come into a group and take advantage of its resources and then leave. Contributing something to the group today in hopes of taking something back later amounts to making a loan to the group. If the recipients of the loan leave, the system of generalized exchange breaks down.
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If the possibility of future reciprocation is the motivation driving an individual's contribution, then the likelihood of providing public goods will be increased to the extent individuals are likely to interact with each other in the future and to the extent that there is some way to keep track of past actions (for example, by making sure contributions are seen by the group as a whole or by providing archives of past actions and contributions). Identity persistence is also a very important feature in encouraging contributions based on reciprocity. If identities are not registered to particular users and stable across time, and if there is no record of past actions and contributions, an account of past contributions, however loose, cannot be kept.
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While participants may accept the existence of outstanding debt, there is likely to be some sense that there should be a rough balance over time. Someone should not simply take without ever contributing to the group. Members may eventually shun those who never give or conversely make an effort to help those who have contributed in the past (helping the “good citizens” of the group). Indeed, some observers (Wellman & Gulia 1997; Rheingold 1993) have reported that individuals who regularly offer advice and information seem to receive more help more quickly when they ask for something.
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One possibility is that a person is motivated to contribute valuable information to the group in the expectation that one will receive useful help and information in return; that is, the motivation is an anticipated reciprocity. As I discussed above, it is sometimes the case that reciprocity will occur within the group as a whole in a system of generalized exchange
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And while the fact that something has the quality of a public good has usually meant that it might be difficult to motivate individuals to produce it, in the case of a privileged group the fact that one's solitary contribution becomes a public good can actually serve as a positive motivation for the person to provide it – there is the hope that it will be seen by and benefit a potentially huge audience.
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A second remarkable characteristic is that the size of the group necessary to produce many public goods is often reduced to one. Groups in which an individual is able and willing to pay the costs of providing a public good by himself or herself are known as privileged groups
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Any piece of information posted to an online community becomes a public good because the network makes it available to the group as a whole and because one person's “consumption” of the information does not diminish another person's use of it. This is a remarkable property of online interaction and unprecedented in the history of human society.
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he value of a public good can also shift as one moves to online interaction. The fact that many of the public goods produced on the Internet consist of digital information means that the goods exhibit pure indivisibility – one person's use of the information in no way diminishes what is available for someone else. And it becomes easy and very cheap to distribute information across the Internet. While these feature are troubling for those concerned with intellectual property rights, they also create powerful incentives for groups interested in providing public goods. Once produced, the good can benefit a limitless number of people. This is unlike physical public goods – there is a large though strictly finite limit to the number of people who can benefit from a fireworks display, a lighthouse, or even national defense. If an individual is motivated in even a small way to benefit the group as a whole, the fact that digital public goods are purely indivisible can be a significant incentive to contribute toward the public good.
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Meeting with other people involved in a social protest or finding out information about the current situation and future plans can become trivially easy online.
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To take the example of a protest letter, Gurak (1997) demonstrates how online interaction reduced the costs of sending a letter out to near zero. Sample letters were sent around the Internet so that individuals did not have to write their own. The usual cost savings of e-mail also meant that there was no need to prepare an envelop, add a stamp, and walk down to the postbox to mail the letter. Online petitions were also circulated in which all one had to do was add one's name to the list and then forward it on. In this case the cost savings may seem trivial – how much effort, after all, does it take to mail a letter of protest? Yet reducing a small costs to near zero can have profound behavioral effects. Consider, as an example, the difference in television viewing habits caused by a remote control. The costs of getting up and changing the channel are very small, but reducing the costs still further (to essentially zero) by use of a remote control creates a dramatically different pattern of channel surfing. A small change in costs can have a disproportionate impact on behavior.
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Online communities exist within a radically different environment. The setting is a (1) network of (2) digital (3) information, and each of these three features drives important changes. It is a world of information rather than physical objects. Further, it is digital information, meaning that it is possible to produce an infinite number of perfect copies of a piece of information, whether that be a computer program, a multimedia presentation, or the archives of a long e-mail discussion. As Negroponte (1995) put it, the setting is one of bits rather than atoms. And finally, this information is being produced not in isolation, but in a deeply interwoven network of actors.
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Providing public goods poses two key challenges. The first is the issue of motivation: getting individuals to contribute to the provision of a public good despite the temptation to free-ride. The decision not to contribute may spring from at least two source – the desire to take advantage of someone else's efforts (greed), or an individual may be willing to cooperate but feel that there is not much of a chance that the good will be successfully provided and so does not want to waste his or her efforts (a concern with efficacy). The second challenge is one of coordination: even if a group of individuals are motivated to contribute toward a public good, they will need to coordinate their efforts and this will involve its own set of difficulties and costs.
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This system of sharing is both more generous and riskier than traditional gift exchange. It is more generous because an individual provides a benefit without the expectation of immediate reciprocation, but this is also the source of risk. There is the temptation is to gather valuable information and advice without contributing anything back. If everyone succumbs to this temptation, however, everyone is worse off than they might have been otherwise: no one benefits from the valuable information that others might have. Thus generalized exchange has the structure of a social dilemma – individually reasonable behavior (gathering but not offering information) leads to collective disaster.
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This kind of network-wide accounting system, in which a benefit given to a person is reciprocated not by the recipient but by someone else in the group, is known as generalized exchange (Ekeh 1974). To offer an example from face-to-face interaction, if I help a stranded motorist in my community, I do not expect that motorist to return the favor, but I may hope and expect someone else in the community to offer me aid should I be in a similar situation
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While a balanced reciprocity with a particular individual may not be possible, there is a sense in which a balance might occur within a group as a whole.
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When people pass on free advice or offer useful information, the recipient is often unknown to them and the giver may never encounter the recipient again. Thus, the usual obligation of a loose reciprocity between two specific individuals is difficult or impossible. Indeed, gifts of information and advice are often offered not to particular individuals, but to a group as a whole. Gifts of information might be offered to a group that has a clearly defined membership (a private discussion list, for example) or to groups that are more loosely defined – for example, information posted in a Usenet discussion group. Even more striking, if the information is posted on a World Wide Web page, there may be only the most tenuous sense of the group – the information may be offered to an unknown set of recipients.
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o the extent this is the concern of an individual, contributions will likely be increased to the degree that the contribution is visible to the community as a whole and to the extent there is some recognition of the person's contributions. The inherent nature of online interaction already means that helpful acts are more likely to be seen by the group as a whole.
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04 Jan 07
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14 Oct 06
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21 Sep 06
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Even a casual trip through cyberspace will turn up evidence of hostility, selfishness, and simple nonsense. Yet the wonder of the Internet is not that there is so much noise, but that there is any significant cooperation at all. Given that online interaction is relatively anonymous, that there is no central authority, and that it is difficult or impossible to impose monetary or physical sanctions on someone, it is striking that the Internet is not literally a war of all against all. For a student of social order, what needs to be explained is not the amount of conflict but the great amount of sharing and cooperation that does occur in online communities.
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23 May 01
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