Organising for Collective Action Projects: An Analysis of the r/place Event
16 Dec 2024
12:30 -14:30
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W4.05 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Operations and Technology Management seminar
Speaker: Dr Chan Tian Heong, Emory University
About this seminar
Collective action projects – eg email campaigns, citizen science projects, or collective stock trades – are projects that depends on mobilising large numbers of participants. While online communities (OCs) have large membership pools and are natural venues to deliver such projects, getting members to participate can be challenging because most members in an OC are latent or stay silent for long periods of time. Leveraging on Reddit’s r/place 2022 event, a collaborative art project where individuals contribute by placing pixels on a white canvas, we test theories of how hierarchical (versus flat) influence structures of an OC affects its ability to succeed in collective action projects. Because the canvas can be worked on simultaneously by many OCs, we were able to consider how the effects of influence structures vary as OCs start interfering with each other’s work. Corroborating our theory that members in hierarchies are less self-directed but are more strongly motivated when the link between actions and outcomes are clear, we show evidence that OCs with hierarchical structures progress faster towards their goal than flat ones, but only when competition intensity is low. OCs with flat influence structures overtake hierarchical ones in terms of progress as competition intensifies. Additional analysis suggests that self-directed newcomers and a segment of moderately active users provide the relative advantage of flat structures under high competition intensity.
A light lunch will be served between 12:30 and 13:15 before the begin of the seminar.
Speaker bio
Tian Chan is an associate professor of Information Systems and Operations Management at Emory University. His research focuses on the new product development processes, particularly on how users, experts and organisations might engage in collaborative problem-solving. Prior to his PhD he worked extensively on new technological and operational improvement projects in the container port industry.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Khanti Tsui.