Online creation communities:  
Styles of reaching cognitive democracy quality

Outline Doctoral research – European University Institute 

Mayo Fuster Morell 
  e-mail: mayo.fuster@eui.eu
 
 Supervision: Pr. D. Della Porta 

	In a context in which the institutionalization of democracy (Della Porta, 2005), but also the institutionalization of knowledge (Santos, 2004), are both in crisis, experiences based in the searching of democratic quality in knowledge-making are determinant.  
	One case of searching the Internet potential to develop democratic quality in knowledge-making, term cognitive democracy, is via the online creation communities. These are a new phenomenon which is growing in interest in the public debate and for social researchers since the middle of the 1990s. Online creation communities challenge society from many points of view. Some significant examples of these challenges are:
•	As a new encounter space for public debate 
•	As a new form of knowledge production (Gibbons et al. 2002) and as a challenge to conventional forms of knowledge, such as the university or the industries based on immaterial goods (Santos, 2005).
•	As resulting in new types of public goods (Di Corinto, 2007) and new “commons-based” model (Benkler,2006).
•	As a new form based on a diverse relationship between knowledge and democracy (Bucchi and Neresini, 2006). 
•	As a challenge to the requirement of hierarchy and centralization in complex and large participated actions.
•	As a new unconventional form of collective action and a new form of democratic conception. 

I aim to facilitate findings to contribute to these exciting fields with this research. However, the objective of the research is strictly focused on the search for the cognitive democratic potential of the Internet in knowledge-making. I intend to develop the research through the case of the online creation communities. The online creation communities are an appropriate case to search the Internet potential for cognitive democratic quality because the online creation communities have a strong online dimension, constituting on some occasions, large, well known  and very widely used experiences, as in the case of Wikipedia, and because they create strong interest in the public debate. 

	My intention in this research is not to propose the online creation community as a general model of knowledge-making. Instead, my analysis leads me to conceive of them as a media-specific and contextual phenomenon. Nevertheless, I still believe online creation communities to be an interesting subject from which a number of lessons can be learned. In spite of the limitations of the research, then, the discovery of the maximization of the Internet for the cognitive democracy of specific knowledge processes, such as the studied here, can help us understand the role played by size, the year of foundation, and democratic and knowledge conceptions.  

Conceptualization of online creation communities, knowledge-making and the cognitive democracy quality

	An Online Creation Community (OCC) refers to a collective action performed by a loosely integrated “network“ of people that, cooperate, communicate and interact, mainly via the Internet, with the common goal of knowledge-making.	
	Knowledge-making can be defined as the process of creation and systematization of socially dispersed information and knowledge resources and cognitive capabilities resulting in evolving bodies of shared knowledge.
	A knowledge-making process following cognitive democracy quality is the one which 1) provides well-organised and multi-lingual information required to participate (usability dimension); 2) facilitates the accessibility to the technology that support the process; 3) is open to participation; 4) has a transparent organization structure and accountable  financial aspects; and, 5) the knowledge management is clear on the authorship and on the conditions of use. These dimensions favour the conditions for generating a consensus between the people participating in the knowledge-making.  

Contributions to the literature

	In political parties and social movement studies, there is already some empirical research on how political parties and social movements have searched the Internet potential for democratic quality. The main findings of this research are that there is a low use of the Internet potential for democratic quality in the case of the political parties, and that in the case of social movements and NGOs there is no one unique strategy, but that there are several styles of searching the Internet potential for democratic quality. 
	Nevertheless, these valuable findings, the debate about the Internet's impact on politics and democracy, show that “much of the attention to the Internet has been directed at the places where the least significant change is likely to occur: the realm of conventional politics” (Della Porta and Mosca, 2006; Bennett, 2003). This research aims to contribute, on the one hand, by enlarging the research subject in two senses, to include other and new forms of collective actors born in the Internet era and whose main dimension of expression is the online dimension, and by enlarging the research subject to include collective action forms whose common objective is knowledge-making. Second, this research aims to contribute to developing more deeply the analysis concerning the cognitive dimension of the Internet potential for democratic quality. 
	From the cognitive approach tradition to social movement studies, initial research has been done in order to address how social movements and collective actors build knowledge. But in these analyses, little attention was dedicated to the way in which the process of making knowledge by collective actors searched for democratic quality and little attention was given to the potentialities of the Internet in facilitating the search for democratic organization in knowledge-making by collective actors. 
 
	Concerning the specific research on the case of online creation communities, the first fields to address regarding online action are those of cybercultural studies and web studies, even through they did not directly address the case of online communities, whose goal is knowledge-making, and they did not consider political agency, size or the time of appearance in their analysis of online communities. 
	In the last few years, the phenomenon of online creation communities has opened a debate on the dispersed organization of knowledge production in the field of organizational studies and initial sociological research has also been developed. In the field of organizational studies, my research could be an empirical contribution to the ongoing debate on distributed knowledge and distributed organizing. However, while the empirical research in this field has mainly concentrated on the Open source – Free software (FLOSS) case, I instead aim to examine a larger typology of online creation communities based on distributed organization. 
	And lastly, the initial sociological empirical research centered specifically on the online creations communities is mainly based on analyzing one type of online creation community; instead, my plan is to contribute to the analysis of online creation communities by a comparison of several types of online creation communities. I especially aim to compare the online creation communities within the frame of the global movement with other online creation communities, such as the Free software development case and Wikipedia case.

Research design

Do the size, time of appearance and the conceptions on democracy and knowledge of the online creation community explain the uses of the Internet potential for developing cognitive democratic quality? 

Research objectives:
A.  The online creation community concerning the dimensions of cognitive democracy quality (as presented in the previous section 4).
B. The differences in the values of the dimensions of cognitive democracy quality depending on: size and time of appearance of the community and on knowledge and democracy conceptions. 

Hypotheses

	I expect to find that in OCCs, there are several styles of searching for cognitive democracy quality. Some online creation communities stress some dimensions while other online creation communities put more emphasis on another set of dimensions. 
	Concerning the impact of time and size, I will present several arguments that suggest expecting my general hypothesis, that is, the size growing and time passing improve democratic organization in OCCs. However, I will also present some possibilities that could also limit my general hypothesis.

    Empirical research 
	The methodological design is embedded in the exploration of the potential of Internet research and its combination with offline methods. 
	Online methods appear to be adequate methods in order to approach a phenomenon which is mainly based on online communications channels. The global dimension of the online creation communities considered and the geographically dispersed base of the participants also favor the use of online methods to reduce travel costs in the development of the empirical research. An online (web) research tool will be built for data collection and interaction with the community participants, and for making accessible the results of the research. 
	I plan to start the empirical research by undertaking a larger-N sample of online creation communities. I will design a codebook and carry out a descriptive statistical analysis. The use of techniques of visualization of digital threads is also considered.  I will then undertake a case study of four diverse cases: (i) Wikipedia - an open online encyclopedia, (ii) a 	Free software development community, (iii) the ESF Memory of the ESF, and, (iv) the BioTech Indymedia. The data collection is planned from a multi-methodological perspective in order to grasp the complexity of an online community. Online and offline ethnography of the communities and participants in ongoing debates, interviews and e-interviews with the participants, quantitative visualization of the digital threads, frame analysis of organizational documents; I expect that the combination of all these methods will give me a fuller account of the group's life and dynamics than each of the methods used alone.

Bibliographic references in this outline 

Benkler, Yochai (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Bennett, W. L. (2003) New Media Power: the Internet and Global Activism. Couldry, Nick, James Curran (eds.) Contesting Media Power: Alternative Media in a Networked World, Rowman and Littlefield Lanham, MD, pp. 17-37.

Bucchi, Massimiano, Neresini, Federico (2006) Science and public participation. Chapter for the New Handbook of Science and Technology Studies Section III: STS and the Public Sphere.

Della Porta, Donatella (2005) Making the polis: social forums and democracy in the global justice movement. Mobilization, vol 10., nº 1, pp.73-94. 

Della Porta, Donatella, Mosca Lorenzo (2006) Report on WP2 – Searching the net.  Project Democracy In Europe and the mobilization of society. http://demos.eui.eu

Di Corinto, Arturo (2007) Free software. Forthcoming. 

Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott, P., Trow, M (2002) The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. Sage Publications. 

Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (2004) Cuadernos pedagógicos de la Escuela 6: La Universidad en el siglo XXI. Para una reforma democrática y emancipadora de la Universidad. Colombia: Ed. Viva la Ciudadanía.