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/ Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results. --GNU Manifesto