Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution
Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution
The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age
The Hacker Ethic and the Spirit of the Information Age
Ethics and Information Technology
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia
HICSS '07 Proceedings of the 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences
Online diaries: Reflections on trust, privacy, and exhibitionism
Ethics and Information Technology
Ethics and Information Technology
Navigating between chaos and bureaucracy: backgrounding trust in open-content communities
SocInfo'12 Proceedings of the 4th international conference on Social Informatics
Hi-index | 0.00 |
Open-source communities that focus on content rely squarely on the contributions of invisible strangers in cyberspace. How do such communities handle the problem of trusting that strangers have good intentions and adequate competence? This question is explored in relation to communities in which such trust is a vital issue: peer production of software (FreeBSD and Mozilla in particular) and encyclopaedia entries (Wikipedia in particular). In the context of open-source software, it is argued that trust was inferred from an underlying `hacker ethic', which already existed. The Wikipedian project, by contrast, had to create an appropriate ethic along the way. In the interim, the assumption simply had to be that potential contributors were trustworthy; they were granted `substantial trust'. Subsequently, projects from both communities introduced rules and regulations which partly substituted for the need to perceive contributors as trustworthy. They faced a design choice in the continuum between a high-discretion design (granting a large amount of trust to contributors) and a low-discretion design (leaving only a small amount of trust to contributors). It is found that open-source designs for software and encyclopaedias are likely to converge in the future towards a mid-level of discretion. In such a design the anonymous user is no longer invested with unquestioning trust.