VOSS: The Comparative Analysis and Theory of Participation in Socio-Technical Systems

University Of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles CA

Investigators

Abstract

Contemporary organizations are inherently participatory -- especially those that depend on the Internet as part of their functioning. Unlike older forms of organization, such "virtual organizations" have the distinguishing feature that organizational boundaries can be easily flexed or dissolved, allowing the inclusion of new people and the adoption of new practices broadly understood to be more participatory, open and transparent. Such a feature is not restricted to "cyberinfrastructures" but is part of a much more general, but still only poorly understood, social phenomena highlighted by press accounts of the democratizing and/or exploitative power of the Internet. This project explores the nature and effects of such public participation on contemporary organizations. The goal is to determine which kinds of participation are most beneficial for innovation and legitimation, as well as what kinds of threats participation might pose, and for whom. To address these questions, the project will collect and analyze a large number of ethnographic case studies, using an innovative software environment for collaborative qualitative research. The project poses three questions: 1. How does the ontogeny of a virtual organization affect conceptions and practices of participation? 2. How do new socio-technical systems (e.g. the Internet) transform participation in Science, Technology Engineering and Medicine (STEM) over time? 3. What is the relationship between the quality of participation and the quality of resource creation, curation and re-use? The research uses and extends a database of over 110 rich case studies of participation, and a software tool for evaluating participation across multiple cases. For question 1 we add new detail to these case studies, based on themes that have emerged from previous research; for question 2 we add cases of pre-Internet forms of participation, to explore more precisely the effects of technological change; and for question 3 we explore a new set of cases that focus on data as a valuable resource.