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 represent a novel form of organizing

  • Little formal hierarchy or roles
  • No markets
  • No face-to-face contact
  • Typically anonymous / pseudonymous
  • Few assignments
  • Cheap to create, join, and leave

They have strange forms of governance

  • The ease of joining—usually anonymously—means that there are bad actors
  • Moderators have godlike powers.
    • Muting and banning
  • Often led by “benevolent dictators”
  • Often plagued by indecision and rule by attrition

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?

Thanks!