This research project asks: How does public engagement in collaborative science and engineering projects affect the process of discovery and innovation? Combining approaches and tools from sociology, information studies, anthropology and public policy, we will provide both concrete models and detailed case studies that analyze the effects of organizations' involvement with members of the organized public on the nature of new networked virtual organizations with respect to three domains of variation: structure, outcomes and governance. The models, concepts and modes of analysis will be constructed to be understandable across disciplines, as well as in the scientific and engineering domains under study.
To build these models and concepts, we will analyze existing cases in the scholarly and popular literature and create in-depth studies of exemplary cases showing how they work and the struggles they face. Our results will have implications for how we measure, report and reward innovation; how we design policy and distribute resources that encourage public participation; and how we build infrastructures that integrate the work of professional scientists with that of other individuals who have a stake in science and engineering.
This project asked how networked virtual organizations (NVOs) affect public participation in processes of innovation and how public participation in turn affects innovation processes. Our project sought to bring some empirical and theoretical grounding to this debate by looking in detail at the range and variability of forms of participation. Rather than relying only on the most visible cases (such as Wikipedia and Linux) we include many different forms of internet-mediated participation: conventional social media, citizen journalism, social entrepreneurialism, free and open source software, science and health related projects, online games, etc. Our findings reveal that internet-mediated participation consists of at least seven distinct dimensions, not all of which are present in every case. We've shown that many existing claims about the power of participation rest on only one or two of these dimensions, ignoring the others. We have produced several papers, a database of over 100 structured case studies, as well as data on the evaluation of these cases. More information is available at http://recursivepublic.net/ The backdrop is an ongoing debate about the nature of "peer production," "Web 2.0," "citizen science" and other labels for internet-mediated participation that enable people to contribute to the generation, development, and distribution of intellectual and cultural resources. One side holds that this technology democratizes innovation. New projects like Wikipedia and Linux are heralded as voluntary enterprises that allow many people to have input in designing and building a collective resource. Advocates of this view favorably contrast them to closed, expert driven, for-profit enterprises like Encyclopedia Britannica or Microsoft Windows. The other side holds that this production model amounts to uncompensated exploitation; participants are creating valuable resources with little or no compensation. Our first step was to build a theoretical model that looked at the different ways of organizing internet mediated participation in innovation. A key aspect of the model is the distinction between "formal social enterprises" (traditional, legal and organizational forms) and "organized publics" (new communities of users, customers, critics or participating individuals). The model analyzes different strengths of organization within and ties between these two structures, their formation, and the resources, tasks, and goals that shape their relationships. This model was published as Fish et al (2011) using the metaphor of a "bird guide" to help observers of the internet distinguish among different types of innovative participation there. The research team then built a database of approximately 105 cases of internet participation (http://birds.recursivepublic.net/). Our research team used online and media research and interviews to analyze these cases in terms of the participation/innovation model generated above. These cases consist of a list of about thirty structured questions including mostly qualitative and some categorical information, designed to facilitate comparison. In order to implement this database we also began work on a software application designed to facilitate comparative analysis of structured cases (called CASE). The final step of the project involved theoretical and empirical work to "disentangle" the many definitions of participation in play in the literature and to apply them to the cases in our database. "Participation" is a widely used though often implicitly defined term in many social scientific and political literatures. Implicit definitions are often discipline and domain specific. Disagreements about the meaning of participation (and its general valence—exploitation vs. democratization) are linked to the complexity and ill definition of the term. We distinguished among 7 different definitions, and then our research team evaluated each of the cases in the database for whether and in what ways, each of these dimensions appeared in the case. We produced two analyses that describe these dimensions and exemplify the cases where they are most visible. Kelty et al 2014 discusses these results across domains and Kelty and Panofsky 2014 discusses science and biomedicine cases in depth. The goal of both studies was to demonstrate that things widely considered to be examples of participation embody very different expressions of participation, and this leads to confusion in debates about its value and power. Broader Impacts: The results of this grant are of use to anyone engaged either involved as a participant or seeking to increase the level of participation in a project; it provides a wider view of the kinds of effects that participation can or cannot have, and as such can help guide expectations about the role of participation. In addition, the grant has funded seven graduate students in the disciplines of information studies and two in anthropology, providing them with an opportunity to develop skills in qualitative research, case-based qualitative analysis, software development, as well as some basic data analysis skills; it has allowed these students to develop related research projects that make use of the case studies, the methods and the software developed, and has helped bring together a community of student and faculty researchers at UCLA interested in these topics.
