Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Managing the Virtual Commons

In today’s reading on managing the virtual commons Peter Kollock and Marc Smith talk about cooperation and conflict in computer communities. One of the main computer communities of their focus was called Usenet. Kollock and Smith say that Usenet was one of the largest computer communication systems that were ever created. Usenet had a similar system to e-mail and the bulletin board system as all three systems were a way of getting your information out and talking to other people who had the same ideas and thoughts as you. Usenet used a newsgroup system where there would be a specific topic in each of these newsgroups and only that topic would be discussed. A user of Usenet can be a member of multiple newsgroups and topics. In this ever popular Usenet system arises the problem of free-rider, a person who does not follow the norm of cooperation and coordination in the system, says Kollock and Smith. As stated Usenet has great potential to provide collective goods but people use this system in a way of spamming instead of information sharing then the collective good is not reached. So while some users up hold their end of the contract by not using too much bandwidth (volume of information per unit time that a computer can handle) the majority of users do not show restraint causing this free-rider problem. Kollock and Smith say that this is not the only problem the success of a newsgroup depends on the content provided. If users are not going to stick to the topic of the newsgroup or spam the bandwidth then the Usenet will not succeed.
These problems were examined by a man named Ostrom (1990) and he says that there are seven things that needed to be followed in order for newsgroups to successfully organize and govern themselves. There must be clearly defined set of boundaries, this along with group size are important in the sense that the more people there are the less probable it is for there to be a major common interest. Ostrom states the necessity of boundaries to this system for the purpose of closing outsiders from reaping the benefits and for encouraging cooperation and frequent interaction. Ostrom also says that any accomplishing community will need a set of rules and institutions. He says that these rules are very important but will not be effective if not properly applied to the right community or newsgroup. The next things that Ostrom talks about is Monitoring and sanctioning. This is the basis for continual success in newsgroups; it acts as a checks and balance system for the newsgroup. Even though there are a great set of rules and institutions in place someone might be breaking them and in effect hurting the group, so monitoring and sanctioning helps fix this problem.
I believe just like Kollock and Smith that Usenet has great potential for collective good once it can function more fluidly through its problems. Usenet has no real main authority and I think that this is its main problem. To me it does not make sense to have such a large flow of open communication with no main authority governing it because eventually confrontation or conflict will arise. Ostrom states that there are certain things needed for these types of social communication systems to survive. One thing that he neglects to mention in the rules of joining groups, I think it would have been more successful if when joining a group there was a period of time one had to watch and read what was going on before jumping in and putting more noise in the group. I thought this was a great reading it is fun to see where the origination of forums and other computer mediated communication came from. I am a member of multiple forums and it is weird to see that even today some of these problems still exist.

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