Online Communities
Online communities foster innovation and provide a sense of community - yet how they self-organize is poorly understood.
Self-Organization in Online Communities
Online communities conduct and foster innovation. Particularly the ongoing artificial intelligence revolution is largely driven by open-source software coding in online innovation communities. These communities bring together geographically dispersed contributors on digital platforms where they openly share knowledge, ideas, experiences, perspectives, problems, and solutions in order to foster innovation. Contributors may freely join and leave communities which mostly operate in self-organization, that is online communities lack managerial control. This enables knowledge exchange in previously unparalleled scale and scope and promises to accelerate innovation.
Yet, the strength of an online innovation community to freely generate and integrate knowledge anytime simultaneously presents a great challenge for efficient coordination. A lack of authority and accountability may delay decision making and frustrate contributors. In turn, contributors may be less engaged slowing the innovation process. Some online communities have established governance structures to deal with this issue. Although these structures may formalize who is accountable for decision making, they may weed out creative contributions.
Why We Study Online Communities
We want to understand how these communities work and how they can be more effective. This is especially important as online communities become more central to innovation. Our research focuses on three main questions:
Time Management: How do communities handle deadlines and urgency? Who or what affects how fast they work, and how does this impact coordination and engagement?
Network Effects: How does each person’s contribution shape the community’s network? How does the network, in turn, influence what and how people contribute?
Self-Governance: How do communities govern themselves? What happens when new rules or systems are introduced?
We use advanced social network and ethnographic methods to explore these questions. Our research is supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG).
Get in touch with Luca Haaks (l.haaks@lmu.de) if you would like to learn more.