I am a social scientist working to understand Internet-based collective action and online commons-based peer production. Over the decade, my research has focused largely on the study of open-source software communities, and the socio-technical systems and governance structures that support these systems of co-production. My recent book, Internet Success: A Study of Open Source Software Commons (MIT Press, 2012) analyzed more than 170,000 such projects, in an effort to explain what leads some to ongoing collaborative success and many others to early abandonment. With this grounding in open source collaboration complete, my research agenda is now expanding into other online peer-production settings that, in some way mimic or borrow collaborative principles from open source software, such as: (1) citizen science in environmental protection and management; (2) open access and open educational resources; (3) open science and collaboration around low-cost or open source engineered scientific equipment and mechanisms to collect and validate data they produce; and (4) the broad study of these and other kinds of “Knowledge Commons” systems.
