Dario Taraborelli: Web communities: Dynamics of online collaboration

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Web communities: Dynamics of online collaboration

The study of the dynamics of collaborative Web communities has attracted a significant attention in research, in particular since the Web 2.0 turn. Online 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 for decades on best practices. A growing body of research, however, has started studying the impact of policies, social and technical constraints on how these communities evolve over time. Measuring the performance and growth over time of these communities, and identifying the effects of disruptive events such as the drop-off of very active contributors, explosions in content or disruptive types of interaction 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 social media services like Flickr and wiki-based communities.

Flickr group dynamics

One year of group activity in the flickrsphere. Each dot corresponds to a Flickr group. Details on membership/content evolution for highlighted groups are displayed on the right.

Collaborators

Nigel Gilbert, University of Surrey
Camille Roth, CNRS
Giovanni Luca Ciampaglia, University of Lugano

Host

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

References

Roth, C., Taraborelli, D., Gilbert, G. (Eds)
Symposium on collective representations of quality
Mind and Society, 10(2) 2011
doi pdf
Taraborelli, D., Ciampaglia, G.L. (2010)
Beyond notability. Collective deliberation on content inclusion in Wikipedia.
Proceedings of the Fourth IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems Workshops (SASOW 2010), Budapest, September 27- October 1, 2010.
doi pdf full text
Taraborelli, D., Roth, C. (2011)
Viable Web communities: Two case studies
G. Deffuant and N. Gilbert (Eds.), Pattern Resilience: Simplifying individual-based models and computing viable or resilient action policies, Springer, 2011.
doi pdf full text
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.
doi 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 developed two Web services as part of this project (read more):

WikiTracer

A prototype of 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 research was supported by two grants from the European Commission: FP6 project PATRES (NEST-043268) and FP7 project QLECTIVES (FP7-ICT-231200).