Group behavior and knowledge building

Hello world (and fellow COMM 245 students),

I am Kevin Locke, a senior in Computer Science with a specialization in mathematics, originally from Montana. I am particularly interested in systems (think Operating Systems - e.g. Windows - fundamental parts of a computer system), networks, and parallel and distributed computing. I have been characterized as a bit of a geek, and I have to admit that I am probably only a few steps away from the stereotypical computer scientist. But I'm fine with that.

There are a lot of interesting phenomena in the online world that I find really fascinating, and don't even remotely understand (which is part of my motivation for taking this course). The one thing that I find particularly interesting as I am writing this entry is the behavior of groups on the internet. Group dynamics are interesting in the physical world, although much of the recorded and studied behavior is anti-social (e.g. riots). In the online world there is certainly some degree of anti-social group behavior, but I find the constructive and collaborative group behavior to be much more interesting.

Particularly, the "wisdom of the crowd" effect that manifests in collaborative information repositories such as Wikipedia and collaborative tagging in sites such as Del.icio.us as well as the recent "crowdsourcing" efforts in many disciplines in both commercial and academic areas. I'm intrigued by how a largely unorganized group of "average" (I am glossing over the many clearly non-average traits being selected here) people with differing areas of knowledge and interest can effectively compile, organize, refine, and create knowledge with such impressive results.

The ability of groups to tend toward a relatively sophisticated level of knowledge rather than the median level for the group seems somewhat counter-intuitive. Also, the ability of many online communities to move past interpersonal problems and disagreements seems to be much more effective than many design-by-committee efforts that are done face-to-face. Gathering a consensus in any group can be difficult, but somehow it seems as though many online communities can either continue without consensus or can reach at least a temporary consensus and move forward much more readily than groups acting offline. I don't understand why this should be the case, given that there is often more contention in an online setting than offline (copious examples of bike-shedding and flame wars omitted). The ability of these groups to function so effectively is remarkable.

This sort of group behavior manifests in nearly all areas of the online world that support user-contributed information, although the dynamics can be quite different across different communication media. In newsgroups, mailing lists, and forums, building shared knowledge is often done in a more debate-like way, which seems to more readily degrade into flame wars and confrontational situations. In shared information spaces such as wikis, the end result tends to be much more prominent and is constructed in a less confrontational and more collaborative way. Although there are edit-wars and other contentious behavior that does manifest on wikis, it seems to be significantly less than on forums and mailing lists. Another question that I would be interested in investigating is what traits of these different communication media encourage these differences in outcome and whether the lessons from one could be transferred to another effectively.