Special Issue on Open Collaboration and Wiki Research

American Behavioral Scientist

Editors: Andrea Forte, Cliff Lampe, Barry Wellman

In the past decade, the popularization of open collaboration tools have led to innovation and disruption of established processes in nearly every dimension of social life. Phenomena like transparency in governance, citizen journalism, open source, open content production, crowdsourcing and distributed innovation have captured the attention of scholars from diverse fields. Although Wikipedia made it a household term, in popular press, the term “wiki” has come to represent a much broader range of ideas than an editable web page.

We invite paper submissions that examine diverse aspects of open collaboration. By open collaboration we mean the development of novel social structures supported by technologies including wikis and other content management systems that allow people to share and build content. The intent of this special issue is to showcase cutting edge research on how open collaboration is organized and how systems that support it are designed, implemented and used in a variety of task contexts. We encourage submissions from diverse disciplines that study social systems, culture and technology.

Suggestions for submission topics include but are not limited to:

• Social structure and organization of open collaborations
• Motivation and incentive to participate
• Technical features of systems that support collaboration
• The use of reputation and rating in open collaboration systems
• The impact of open collaboration on

• education and learning
• scientific collaboration
• journalism
• government
• business
• knowledge management

American Behavioral Scientist (ABS) is a monthly, peer-reviewed journal that provides in-depth perspectives on contemporary topics throughout the social and behavioral sciences. Each issue offers comprehensive analysis of a single topic, examining inter-disciplinary, important, and diverse arenas.

Abstracts Due: Dec 15, 2011

Invitations to Submit: Jan 5

Papers Due: Mar 31

Notification: May 1

**************

Submission Procedure

Interested authors should submit an abstract of no more than 500 works by December 15th. The proposal should include A. the central research question(s), B. relevant analytical methods and theoretical frameworks, C. some basic description of what contribution the author(s) expect to make. Please include a brief (1-2 sentence) biography of the author(s).

Authors whose abstracts are accepted will be invited to submit a full manuscript of 7,000-8,000 words for  review by March 31st. Since ABS is an interdisciplinary journal that serves a broad readership, authors should strive to make their contributions clear to non-specialist audiences.

Please email abstract submissions to aforte@drexel.edu, subject: ABS Wiki Research

***************