SAVI: Collaborative Research: Fostering New Collaborations in Open Online Community Data Research: Prototyping an Open Collaboration Data Factory

University Of Missouri-Columbia, Columbia MO

Investigators

Abstract

Open online communities (OOC), such as Wikipedia or free and open source software (FOSS) development projects, have emerged as significant drivers of innovation, economic activity and social well-being. OOCs play important roles in a wide variety of areas, such as software development, knowledge management, education, health and scientific discovery. With support from both American and international funding agencies, scholars from diverse disciplines, including computer science, sociology, mathematics, economics, physics, anthropology, organization science and communications, have been studying OOCs to build disciplinary understanding. However, differences in data and method impede the development of coherent understandings across disciplines. The study of OOCs is nascent, and as yet not much attention has been paid to the development of principles and systems for sharing data and detailed methodological approaches. These gaps limit scientific progress around OOCs even as they are increasing in importance for organizing and accomplishing work. The goal of this Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) project is to build an international inter-disciplinary community of scholars who can collaborate to overcome disciplinary differences in research aims, data and method. The supported collaboration will enable synthesis of OOC research, which in turn will increase the coherence of scientific and public knowledge across disciplines that study OOCs, making OCCs more productive and effective. The project design is based on the principle that research collaborations among scholars from multiple disciplines are more likely to develop from actively engaging potential collaborators in a shared activity, rather than simply getting them together in a room to talk. Accordingly, the project will involve participants in a series of working groups, workshops and hackathons focused on the activity of specifying, designing and prototyping an ?Open Collaboration Data Factory? (OCDF). The long-term vision for the OCDF includes a common set of easily accessible and replicable research datasets, and tools and processes that support research addressing the challenges of OOC systems, such as workflow tools to encourage creation of high-quality datasets; practice guidelines to facilitate consistent application of common research methods; documented research and resource exemplars to support coherent mapping of theory, data-based measures and available analytic tools; and ethical and privacy guidelines for processing OOC data. The SAVI funds will support coordination work, meetings and collocated prototyping among OOC researchers from diverse disciplines in the USA and Europe to build community through taking the initial steps towards this vision. The project will also include an initial phase inventorying research communities and research questions to in order to identify, characterize and annotate available datasets and software tools and identify strategies for increasing compatibility between them. All products and outcomes of the project will be made available under open licenses to further promote the reproducibility of studies and methods. This is designated as a Science Across Virtual Institutes (SAVI) award and is co-funded by NSF's Office of International and Integrative Activities.