[Air-L] Good/recent undergrad reading on Online Cooperation

[Benj. Mako Hill]

Greetings Joseph and the rest of AIR!

<quote who="Joseph Reagle" date="Tue, Dec 19, 2017 at 01:44:34PM -0500">
> Kollock's (1999) "The Economies Of Online Cooperation: Gifts And
> Public Goods In Cyberspace" [1] was great because it distinguished
> between some theoretic concepts (gifts, public goods, digital goods)
> and touched on motivations and limits. It is, also, very old---not
> many students know what Usenet and The WELL are.
> 
> Any suggestions for a similar, high level, overview of the why, how,
> and limits to online cooperation? (There's tons of literature on all
> those topics of course, but I'm struggling to find something pithy,
> comprehensive, and current.)

I don't know of anything recent that does everything that Kollock's
fantastic piece does. If other's do, I'd love to hear!

It's no "Economies of Online Cooperation" but a couple years ago,
Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw put together a book chapter reviewing the
first 15 years of research on peer production. Peer production is
obviously just a subset of online cooperation but I've venture that
it's been of the most active streams of research that has build on
Kollock's seminar work:

  Benkler, Yochai, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2015. “Peer
  Production: A Form of Collective Intelligence.” In Handbook of
  Collective Intelligence, edited by Thomas Malone and Michael
  Bernstein, 175–204. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
  https://mako.cc/academic/benkler_shaw_hill-peer_production_ci.pdf

I hope that's helpful!

Regards,
Mako


-- 
Benjamin Mako Hill
http://mako.cc/academic/

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