THESIS DEFENSE: Haiyi Zhu
When
-
Where
GHC 4405
Description
What I Study about when I Study about Online Production:
The Individual, Practice and Community Level of Success in Peer Production
Haiyi Zhu
COMMITTEE
Robert Kraut (Chair)
Aniket Kittur (Chair)
Jason Hong
Yochai Benkler (Harvard)
Ching (Yuqing) Ren (UMN)
DOCUMENT AND MATERIALS
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~haiyiz/Dissertation_Zhu.pdf
ABSTRACT
Since the late twentieth century, open source software projects—the GNU/Linux operating system, the Apache web server, Perl and many others—have achieved phenomenal success. This success can be attributed to a new paradigm of productivity in which individuals voluntarily collaborate to produce knowledge, goods and services. Benkler claims this productivity paradigm is a “new, third mode of production” particularly suited for “the digitally networked environment” (2002). Labeled “peer production,” this paradigm contrasts with market and managerial hierarchies. In addition to open source projects, the peer production model, in different forms, has been used in areas such as science/citizen science (Silvertown, 2009), library science (Weinberger, 2007), politics (Castells, 2007; Jenkins, 2006), education (Daniel, 2012), journalism (Gillmor, 2004), and culture (Jenkins, 2006; Lessig, 2004).
As peer production has flourished, merely describing successful cases has become less useful. Instead, scholars must identify the dynamics, structures, and conditions that contribute to or impede that success. Toward that end, this dissertation combines theoretical approaches in organization science with in-depth empirical analysis on a range of peer production projects to examine the mechanisms that underlie their success. Specifically, I examine three management challenges, at three levels, that impede the success of peer production: the individual level challenge, the practice level challenge and the community level challenge.
The contributions of my dissertation are twofold. For scholars in organizational studies, my dissertation advances the understanding of non-bureaucratic, dynamic, flat and informal peer production systems. For practitioners, my dissertation offers practical advice to build more effective and successful peer production projects.