The Berkman Center Cooperation Project

There’s kind of an in-joke that’s popped up within the Berkman Center within the past couple of months among the group of research assistants that work on the online case studies research group. There’s so many simultaneous moving parts and research efforts going on within the cluster of projects that comprise The Cooperation Project and its allies that we’ve affectionately just started calling it simply, “Cooperationland.” In point of fact, it’s been remarked by a few of the people on the project that the pieces of the project get so numerous that sometimes even we have trouble articulating exactly in nice, simple terms what we do for a living at fancy cocktail parties, family gatherings, and that sort of thing. Embarrassing.

Though, ultimately, the question remains simple: what creates cooperation online? What community rules and structural design mechanisms can be put into place to encourage collaboration?

That’s a big one. So, in what hopes to be the first of a series of weekly posts, we’re hoping that we can provide some kind of clear context and simple, non-technical update to the sorts of things that are happening on the project. We’re hoping it becomes a source of information not only for people interested in tracking our progress, but getting involved as well.

One of the big problems we’re trying to address is this: even after years of discussion about communities online, Web 2.0, and the value of the Internet in generating cooperation — our actual knowledge of the space is still pretty shallow. Very shallow, in fact. Though it remains a terrifically impressive project, it’s almost a bit of a cliche to mention Wikipedia as an example at this point. And, the set of examples used by researchers in the field beyond that remain mostly small: Threadless, Facebook, Couchsurfing, Linux and… Indeed, such a small set holds the disturbing possibility that most of our most optimistic predictions of the web are based on only a limited set of a few fluke cases. Which, of course, would imply that there’s some real problems with the way we think about the internet.

That is to say that our problem is not only one of understanding what makes cooperation in communities and projects online tick, but one of even knowing what’s out there in the first place.

Imagine being marooned on a desert island and being asked to understand the animals and plants on the island with no foreknowledge of biology or anything. How do you start? The only way you can: wandering around and making observations. Then, given enough observations, the hope is that patterns will start to emerge, and that you’ll be able to classify sets of objects by their features (“the scaled animals are lizards”). This strategy, the creation of a descriptive taxonomy, is a big part of the initial phase of our research.

This requires, of course, two things: a) a set of specimens and b) a set of instruments that let you examine them in a rigorous, systematic way. We’ve been working on building both over the past few months and it’s currently the big lions share of our work during January. More on how this has been taking place next week.

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 15th, 2009 at 1:38 am and is filed under project update, Weekly Updates. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.