How do we understand value, economics, labor, ethics, and emergent effects within the networked organization? (a map of the internet as a metaphor below)

Current Projects

Digitally Networked Labor in Social Entrepeneurship
(collaboration with Adam Fish, UCLA Department of Anthropology)

ExpertLens – Distributed Technologies to Enable Forecasting and Decision-making amongst Semi-experts (collaboration with the RAND corporation)

Current Papers

 

2010: Fish, A. and Srinivasan, R. "Digitally-Networked Labor in Social Entrepeneurship", in preparation.

2010: Dalal, S., Khodyakov, D., Srinivasan, R., Straus, S. and Adams, J.. "ExpertLens: A System for Eliciting Opinions from a Large Pool of Non-Collocated Experts with Diverse Knowledge", Technology Forecasting and Social Change, under review. (Collaboration with the RAND corporation)

 

 

With a more ubiquitous and widely accessible web, the trope of the user emerged and reached a zenith in the early 2000s. The movement away from seeing the web as an aggregate of users toward a set of communities with their own social, mediated protocols emerges with the growth of Web 2.0 and social media. The question now moves back toward the masses – The question of what value can be extracted and generated out of the interactions of multiple publics, and how this can enable a seemingly effective union between the social and the entrepeneurial? This points to emergent questions around crowdsourcing, and the analysis of the network, exemplified by the emergent virtual organization.

Some key questions include:

How can we understand the externalities of networked virtual organizations that engage multiple publics?

How are we to understand the nature of labor within these organizations?

How are we to situate our understanding of these organizations relative to an earlier history of globalized organizations that network workers and users?

Under what conditions does the 'Wisdom of Crowds' thesis hold true? Under what conditions is it better to work with mass quantified estimates?

What is the role of the expert vs. the amateur in the context of networked crowdsourcing projects?

Who are the different publics in a networked organization and how do we understand the economic benefits for particular publics (vis a vis others) in these organizations?

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