Essays on volunteer mobilization in peer production

Abstract

Although some examples of Internet-based collaborative "peer production" -- like Wikipedia and Linux -- build large volunteer communities and high-quality information goods, the vast majority of attempts at peer production never even attract a second contributor. This dissertation is composed of three essays that describe and test theories on the sources and effects of volunteer mobilization in peer production. The first essay is a qualitative analysis of seven attempts to create English-language online collaborative encyclopedia projects started before January 2001, when Wikipedia was launched. Analyzing data from interviews of these Wikipedia-like projects' initiators, along with extensive archival data, I offer a set of three propositions for why Wikipedia, similar to previous efforts and a relatively late entrant, attracted a community of hundreds of thousands while the other projects did not. In the second essay, I use data from the Scratch online community -- a large website where young people openly share and remix animations and games -- to present evidence of a trade-off between "generativity" (i.e., qualities of work products likely to attract follow-on contributors) and the originality of the derivative work products that follow. In the third essay, I consider the relationship between volunteer mobilization and governance in peer production organizations. Although large successful peer production projects have inspired scholars and social movements, I use longitudinal data of internal processes drawn from a population of wikis to show that, like other democratic organizations, peer production projects exhibit governance consistent with Robert Michels' "Iron Law of Oligarchy."