Tree of Knowledge

This research position would be very interesting:

Research Assistant positions with The Cooperation Research Group: Case Studies in Commons-Based Peer Production

Project Description:

What makes Wikipedia or digg succeed?  What makes other collaborative efforts fail?  Peer production—large scale cooperation among human participants—has become an increasingly important mechanism for the creation of information, knowledge, and culture.  Civil society organizations like the Sunlight Foundation are building collaborative platforms to expose government abuses.  Businesses like Threadless T- Shirts and Amazon Mechanical Turk are using it to harness distributed intelligence and work capabilities.  The intelligence community has set up an internal Intellipedia, and the Army, Company Commander. Some diffuse social networks like CouchSurfing or BookCrossing are using it to share sleeping accommodations or books, while others, like DailyKos, harness political mobilization.

The Cooperation Research Group, led by Professor Yochai Benkler, analyzes the design of cooperative human systems through a combination of interdisciplinary observational, experimental, and theoretical studies. As part of this project, the group is embarking on a new effort to provide a map of commons-based and cooperative peer production today. The purpose of the study is to offer a systematic analysis of a wide range of information and knowledge production sectors, to identify practices, list them, describe them, and categorize them.

However, given that it’s almost exactly what I’ve been doing for my dissertation, I can’t complain too much.

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