Community, Competition and Citizen Science: Voluntary Distributed Computing in a Globalized World by Anne Holohan

Author:Anne Holohan [Holohan, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Globalization
ISBN: 9781351950114
Google: DEaoDQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 33345732
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2013-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

Forums and Teams

Forums are the focal point of community interaction. They can be based around projects, either independent (GIMPS’ Mersenne Forum) or part of the BOINC set up (CPDN forum), and they facilitate discussion between individual volunteers and also organize and facilitate team discussion. Some teams come out of interaction on forums, and some forums such as ArsTechnica, are not associated with any one project but are a forum for volunteers who can be involved in more than one project.

The power of joining a team in generating a ‘community’ feel is significant. Isabel, a volunteer on CPDN described how: ‘I joined a team and got to know a couple of members of my team, and personally, I think that the team aspect is very important. It helps people to know each other and sometimes the teams set up their own forums. I belong to a BOINC team, and I’ve got to know, over the internet, two or three people on my team, and this can be very helpful to encourage people, to provide a social side to those who want to know. I think that generally speaking the people in the team, some of the teams, really, just want to know each other, be with likeminded people. But generally speaking, the teams want to do well. They want everyone in the team to be doing as much as possible’.

Teams can be based on work place affiliation, nationality, or ethnic minorities – Geraldine states: ‘My own team is Catalonia [although not a Catalonian herself], which is the Spanish minority. The people who belong to it are Catalan separatists, they don’t feel Spanish, they feel they are Catalans’ – or esoteric bases, such as a passion for Monty Python movies – the Team that Goes ‘Ni’.

What a ‘community’ is has changed over the years in VDC, particularly after the launch of BOINC. For pre-BOINC veterans, the sense of community has gone down because when approximately the same number of participants per team pre-BOINC are now distributed over two hundred projects, there is not going to be that many people working on the same project, so there is less to share. It is still the oldest projects, including the ones who remain outside BOINC, that have the most loyal following. On the one hand, BOINC opened up and increased participation; on the other hand, it diluted the glue that community provides.

Trust is an essential element in a community. Trust resulting from working together is called ‘process based trust’ (Zucker, 1987) and working together as part of the same VDC project can yield ‘institutional based trust’ (Zucker, ibid.). Both types of trust are reinforced greatly through the additional activity of participation in a team and in a forum. The forums are a place where there is friendly competition amongst members of a particular team as well as cooperation amongst team members in order to improve the relative standing of their own team. This structure is replicated at the team level where there is competition

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