Scientific communities in cyber-enabled infrastructures are socio-technical innovation systems that exhibit the characteristics of self-organizing complex adaptive systems. Using empirically grounded and conceptually valid agent simulation models of science, the project explores minimal structural and behavioral conditions, that is, the simplest set of assumptions, for the emergence and sustainment of creativity and innovation in Scientific Commons (SCs). The computer-aided ethnography software, called SC Browser, facilitates ethnographic observation of the social and technical networks in communities such as CreativeCommons, Scholarpedia, CollabRX, and OpenWetWare. Inspired by the Actor-Network Theory that focuses on translation networks involving human, symbolic, and physical actors, SC Browser is an advanced analytical tool that aggregates views of interaction among actors and at the same time preserve access to raw research material data sets for qualitative analysis and foundational hypothesis generation to construct computational simulations and to study co-evolution of scientific knowledge, community, and domain practices in the context of systems model of creativity.
The simulation study (1) considers the discourse of scientific activity, including the contribution of new knowledge in virtual scientific commons, growth of the domain knowledge, and the clustering of research into specialties, (2) views science as an autonomous and self-regulating socio-cognitive system through the introduction of motivation and competitive nature of knowledge production, and (3) explores the impact of alternative community cultures (e.g., exploration-oriented, service-oriented, and utility-oriented), peer evaluation styles (e.g., centralized, decentralized) on the sustainability and innovation potential of SCs. Besides advancing the socio-technical and cultural understanding of cyber-enabled innovation communities, the project produces an integrated and customizable agent simulation framework, called SciSIM, for science policy mechanism design and decision analysis for virtual scientific communities to improve sustainable innovation. Using SciSim, the project demonstrates how social networks and market mechanisms provide a sound formal basis to study dynamics of scientific communities using reliable and valid structural and organizational climate metrics.
Broader Impacts: The project aims to facilitate training of students to develop computational thinking skills in Science and Technology (S&T) studies. As such, this research is expected to advance the state of the art in S&T curriculum via introduction of computational models as pedagogical instruments. Furthermore, the simulation environment and its associated models can be used by NSF administration for use as a computational laboratory for science policy analysis. Along with the findings of earlier work on Open Source Communities, this project aims to derive of common unifying principles innovation in scientific commons and their documentation via a book on the topic of Sustainable Creativity and Innovation in User Innovation Communities.
