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The Structural Dimension of Cooperation

其他書名	Cooperation Networks as Cohesive Small Worlds
出版	Universitat de Barcelona. Facultat d'Economia i Empresa, 2017
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=mXZ60AEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋"The last half of twentieth century has witnessed a key shift in the production process of knowledge: the most important discoveries and innovations in science and technology are not anymore the result of the work of very talented individuals working alone, but the result of cooperation and teamwork. The remarkable increase in scale of cooperation in knowledge intensive production processes has renewed the interest in analyzing the mechanisms by which large scale cooperation emerges and thrives. The two main theoretical approaches to cooperation are, on the one hand, a micro approach that considers cooperation as an atomic process in which cooperation is produced between two individuals and, on the other hand, as a macro level phenomenon in which the center of analysis is the collectively or group. The aim of this research is to bridge the gap between macro level and micro level approaches to cooperation by focusing on meso level mechanisms, which until recently have received little attention in the theoretical debate. I argue that a meso level approach has to focus on the structural dimension of cooperation, that is, the patterns of relations between the individuals that participate in production processes, what I call cooperation networks. This perspective shows that between the dyadic interactions among individuals, and the shared goals and values that guide large organizations and groups, there are subgroups of individuals that play a key role in enabling the kind of large scale cooperation that we have witnessed during the last decades. This research focuses on the case study of two large, mature, and successful Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) projects --the Debian operating system and the Python programming language-- in order to build a structural theoretical framework that helps explain and understand how large scale cooperation works. I present a network model, that I name Cohesive Small World, which is based on two well established network models: the Small World model and the Structural Cohesion model. I propose that these two models are not mutually exclusive. The family of networks that fit in the intersection of both models exhibit consistent structural patterns. These patterns, I argue, provide the scaffolding for the emergence of collaborative communities, such as FOSS projects, and enable and foster effective large scale cooperation. On the one hand, the generation of trust and congruent values among heterogeneous individuals are fostered by structurally cohesive groups in the connectivity hierarchy of cooperation networks because individuals embedded in these structures are able to compare independent perspectives on each other through a variety of paths that flow through distinct sets of intermediaries, which provides multiple independent sources of information about each other. Thus, the perception of an individual embedded in such structures of the other members of the group to whom she is not directly linked is filtered by the perception of a variety of others whom she trusts because is directly linked to them. This mediated perception of the group generates trust at a global scale. On the other hand, the existence of dense local clusters connected between them by relative short paths allows successful cooperation among heterogeneous individuals with common interests and, at the same time, fosters the flow of information between these clusters preventing the local clusters to be trapped in echo chambers of like minded collaborators. I developed heuristics to compute the k-components structure, along with the average node connectivity for each k-component. These heuristics allow to compute the approximate value of group cohesion for moderately large networks, along with all the hierarchical structure of connectivity levels, in a reasonable time frame. I show that these heuristics can be applied to networks at least one order of magnitude bigger than the ones manageable by the only algorithm available until now. I test empirically the new network model that I proposed to further our understanding how cooperation in collaborative communities works. I find that the model that I named "Cohesive Small World" is a good fit to describe the cooperation patterns of the two big and mature FOSS projects that I analyze in the empirical part of this thesis. To further the empirical analysis, I explore the dynamic dimension of the connectivity hierarchies that emerge on the cooperation networks of the Python and Debian projects. I defined cooperation networks as the patterns of relations among developers established while contributing to the project. The dynamic analysis that I present is not only a longitudinal account of the changes in the hierarchy through time, but also the analysis of the pace of renewal of individuals in the positions defined by the hierarchy. I show that the Cohesive Small World model is a solid theoretical framework to define cohesive groups in cooperation networks. The nested structure of k-components nicely captures the hierarchy in the patterns of relations that individual contributors establish when working together. This hierarchy, on the one hand, reflects the empirically well established fact that in FOSS projects only a small fraction of the developers account for most of the contributions. And, on the other hand, refutes the naive views of early academic accounts that characterized FOSS projects as a flat hierarchy of peers in which every individual does more or less the same. I also show that the position of individual developers in the connectivity hierarchy of the cooperation networks impacts significantly, on the one hand, on the volume of contributions that an individual does to the project. And, on the other hand, the median active life of developers in the project. I argue that the latter is a better way to analyze robustness of FOSS projects than the classical random and targeted attacks that has been used to assess robustness in other kinds of networks. I argue that the connectivity structure of collaborative communities' cooperation networks can be characterized as an open elite, where the top levels of this hierarchy are filled with new individuals at a high pace. This feature is key for understanding the mechanisms and dynamics that make FOSS communities able to develop long term projects, with high individual turnover, and yet achieve high impact and coherent results as a result of large scale cooperation. I conclude that cooperation in FOSS communities has a structural dimension because membership in cohesive groups that emerge from cooperation networks has an important and statistically significative impact on both the volume of individual contributions, and on the median active life of developers in the projects under analysis." -- TDX.