A MODEL OF ONLINE COLLABORATION FOR KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION

Large scale collaboration is a fundamental characteristic of human society, and has recently manifested in the development and proliferation of online communities. These virtual social spaces provide an opportunity to explore large scale collaborations as natural experiments in which determinants of success can be tested. In order to do this, we first review previous work on meddling online communities to build an understanding of how these communities function. Having thus identified the operating mechanisms inherent in online communities, we propose a population ecology model of online communities that seeks to explain a number of statistical patterns from a selection of such communities.