Dario Taraborelli: Web communities: Dynamics of online collaboration

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Web communities: Dynamics of online collaboration

The evolution of content-based collaborative Web communities has attracted a significant attention in research, in particular since the Web 2.0 turn. Peer production systems typically die of inactivity for an insufficient number of valuable contributions or, conversely, whenever quality assessment becomes unmanageable due to content explosion or ineffective measures against spam or vandalism. The governance of such communities has been based so far on best practices and recommendations, as we lack empirical evidence on the impact of specific policies on how these communities evolve. Measuring the performance and evolution over time of these communities, and identifying disruptive events such as the drop-out of active contributors, content explosion or vandalism could shed a light on how to better grow these communities.

Can we identify factors that determine the life and death of content-based online communities? How can communities in mutual competition secure their performance and the quality of their output? What is the relation between governance, content selectivity and participation in social Web communities?

The aim of this project is to study factors affecting the sustainability of content-based online communities and help develop tools to achieve or restore desired goals in content and population dynamics. Case studies for this project include content-based social networking services like Flickr and wiki-based communities.

Collaborators

Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey
Camille Roth, CNRS

Host

Centre for Research in Social Simulation
Department of Sociology, University of Surrey

References

Taraborelli, D., Roth, C. (2010)
Viability of collaborative Web communities: Two case studies
N. Gilbert, G. Deffuant (Eds.), Pattern Resilience, Springer, 2010. forthcoming
Roth, C., Taraborelli, D., Gilbert, N. (2008)
Démographie des communautés en ligne: le cas des wikis (Demographics of online communities: The case of wikis), Réseaux, 26 (152) 2008, 205-240
doi pdf full text
Baldassarri, A., Barrat, A., Capocci, A., Halpin, H., Lehner, U., Ramasco, J., Robu, V., Taraborelli, D. (2008)
The Berners-Lee Hypothesis: Power laws and Group Structure in Flickr
In: H. Alani, S. Staab, and G. Stumme (Eds.), Social Web Communities, Number 08391 in Dagstuhl Seminar Proceedings, Dagstuhl, Germany.
pdf full text
Taraborelli, D., Roth, C., Gilbert, N. (2008) Measuring wiki viability (II). Towards a standard framework for tracking content-based online communities. pdf (white paper)
Roth, C., Taraborelli, D., and Gilbert, N. (2008)
Measuring wiki viability. An empirical assessment of the social dynamics of a large sample of wikis.
Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Wikis - WikiSym 2008, Porto, September 8-10, 2008.
pdf full text
Roth, C. (2007). Viable wikis: struggle for life in the wikisphere.
Proceedings of the 3rd international symposium on Wikis - WikiSym 2007, 119-124, New York, NY, USA. ACM.
doi pdf full text

Bibliographic database

latest additions

Web services

I designed and developped two Web services as part of this project (read more):

WikiTracer

A web service providing platform-independent analytics and comparative growth statistics for wikis.

Year: 2008-2009 (not publicly released)
Languages: PHP, Javascript, Flash, XML, XSD, SQL, CSS

Flickr Group Trackr

A web service to track and analyse demographic and activity metrics for public Flickr groups.

Year: 2007-2008
Languages: PHP, Javascript, SQL, CSS
Featured on: Lifehacker, Programmable Web ("Best new mashup"), Yahoo! Gallery ("Editor's picks"), Computational Aesthetics, Flickrbits.

Funding

This project is supported by a grant from FP6 project PATRES (NEST-043268).