Online Organizations and Organizing
The Internet is depressing
- Harassment
- Radicalization
- Misinformation
But it’s also the site of collaboration and generosity
Two main “types” of organizing online
- Ad-hoc organizing
- Hashtag activism
- Information spreading (e.g., Women’s March
organizing)
- Online organizations
- Wikipedia
- Subreddits
- Facebook Groups
Collaborative online organizations are exciting
They produce large-scale public goods
- Non-excludable
- Non-rivalrous
They are susceptible to and protected by bots
- Because they are online, bots can attack
- Beneficial bots protect the work of
communities
- Affordances make “reverting” easy
Peripheral members are really important
- Incredible inequality in activity
- Vast majority are lurkers, then occasional
contributors, with a few supercontributors
- People move from periphery into central roles
They are fluid systems
- Push the boundary of what an organization is and
who belongs to it
- Actions are both much more visible and more
anonymous
- People belong to and participate in many at
once
- Not always clear where one organization ends and
another begins
Discussion Questions
- What online organizations do you participate in? In
what ways do they operate as organizations?
- Generate two hypotheses about how an organizational
process or theory would operate differently in the context of online
organizations.
Discussion Questions
- What are some differences in how leadership is
exercised in online organizations compared to traditional
organizations?
- How can we characterize what outputs online
organizations are better or worse at producing compared to traditional
organizations?
It is a good time to study online organizations
There is so. much. data.
- Individual contributions
- Within organizations
- Across organizations
Studies can take a systems approach
- Study multiple organizations
- Study how organizations interact
- Study how people move through organizations
Example: Subreddit bans
- Chandrasekharan et al. (2017) looked at how banning
subreddits influenced the amount of hate speech in adjacent
communities
- But they also looked at individual behavior
- Some users quit reddit
- Others adjusted their behavior to meet community
norms
There are still lots of open questions
- Can AI help to organize online communities?
- How are people shaped by the communities they
participate in?
- What kind of organizations can’t exist as online
organizations?
- How do people choose what to contribute to?
- How do organizations compete with each other?