1. Essay
Collaboration and Participation in Web 2.0
by Maria Gomez Aguirre
Student Id: 100034l3
CMP007N Principles of Digital Media
MA Digital Media
London Metropolitan University
January 2011

2. Maria Gomez Aguirre | 1
Collaboration and Participation in Web 2.0
In this essay we will talk about participation, the factors that lead collaborative projects to success
or failure and how it is this applied within the Web 2.0.
As Lind (2007) says Collaboration is quite a difficult term to define. She suggests it to be a word
that englobes all of “the diverse working methods that require more than one participant”. London
(1995) goes a bit further defining it as the process in which different parties come together in the
aim of reaching a common goal. Although he is using the term as a key methodology to resolve
problem within a community I think this can be apply to all aspects of society, including new
media.
On the other hand, we have the term Participation that Lind (2007) represents as working together
with the idea of having something in return. The same opinion seems to have Shirky (2008) when
he explain the idea behind Nupedia (even when it did not succeed), an online encyclopedia with
articles written by scholars, which main objective was to compile the works written by experts and
sharing freely (an author shares his articles with the aim of accessing others).
In this essay we will be using both terms indistinctly, as we believe, based on the definitions
explained previously, that they differ each other only slightly.
Working in a collaborative way does not just that applies to new media, but it can be found in a lot
of different environments, for instance Gray (1989) argues that collaborative techniques are the
most optimal way to approach problem solving.
Focusing on new technologies we should state that Web 2.0 means collaboration. We can have a
look at the comparison made by O'Reilly (2005) to confirm this statement. He lists some of the
applications or services that in his opinion make the core of Web 2.0 and all of them have
collaboration or participation as common feature (Google, Flickr, Wikipedia, blogs, etc). Even
though the article we are referring to was written before the golden age of user-generated sites like
Twitter and Facebook, O'Reilly was capable of forecasting the importance of the public in the future
of the Internet. This has to make us questioning what are the reason or motivations behind this
behaviour and why the public is so willing to participate and became a member of online's
communities.

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Let's start by analysing the following example:
Linux is probably one of the first and most successful collaborative projects. Linus Torvalds has
been able to lead a community of thousand of people towards a shared goal: the creation of an
operative system. One of the keys of this success resides in a fundamental principle: making life
easier. Essentially Torvalds started his project based on a already existing operative system adding
new features that were useful for him. He asked for help in an online community and offered in
return a completely accessible and “ready to be modified” system (Moon, 2002). This confirms the
definition of participation explained previously. Another important factor of Linux, and in
collaborative projects or platforms, is that the members share interests and that makes them
participate actively. However this is not always that easy, that is why the leader or leaders of the
group need to encourage the participation, by for instance giving the more active participants some
kind of recognition (in the case of Linux this takes the form of becoming a credited developer or
maintainer (Moon, 2002)).
We have just mention an important role in any community, the leader. It may appear as
collaborative community is not synonymous of hierarchy or organization, when the reality is not
even close. Jaques and Salmon (2007) divide groups into three categories based on the leadership's
style: Autocratically led groups, Democratically led groups and Laissez-faire groups. They also
assert that although democratic leadership is the most popular, the approach to take it will always
depend on the nature of the group and its goals: in the case Linux's development community it may
look like it is a democratic one, however it is ultimately Torvalds (or any of the appointed
developers) who decide whether a new feature is to be included in the system. As well as leader,
whatever his approach is, there has to be a well defined hierarchy on place in order to maintain the
well being of the community. In news-aggregation sites like Digg or Reddit the users are the one to
rate the news and so to decide the news to reach the front page, however there are a series of
moderators who can change this if they decide that the content is inappropriate and therefore
downgrade it.
One of the most characteristic tools of Web 2.0 are the Social Network sites or SNS. Boyd and
Ellison (2007) define SNS as web-base platforms where individuals can create a online reflection of
themselves, connect with other individuals and enter in some kind of interaction that varies
depending on the system. They also analyse the history of SNS, appointing their origin in the
already extinguished SixDegrees.com. They are normally created to connect people who share
interests or hobbies or even ethnicity and nationality. Examples of this are Linkedln (a professional
SNS) and Match.com (online dating SNS). However there are other like Facebook or Twitter which,

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even though they started with a closed user base, now they are opened to a much broader audience.
Focusing in participation we could assume that individuals decide to join a SNS mainly with the
idea of having something in return, being this job opportunities (Linkedln) or connect with you
already friends in real life (Facebook).
One special case that is worth mentioning is MySpace. Originally created to compete in the market
with similar sites like Friendster it based its target audience in youth people. The main difference
with the others (and probably the reason of its early success) was the possibility of modifying the
HTML code of your profile. However, the most interesting aspect was the use that musicians and
music bands have made of it, by modifying their profile and providing free samples of their music.
This allows musician the opportunity to reach a much broader audience, even some of them making
a career out of this (Cieslak, 2006).
This example of the music industry and the use of SNS takes to the next topic to study: user-
generated content. Its use is a key factor in a wide range of applications, being those open-source
software (as explained previously), wikis and SNS, among others. Online and media companies has
started to realise that providing the users with an space where they can participate and give their
point of view is much more lucrative than only giving them material to consume. This idea of
participation gives recognition to the users and encourage them. We can find sites as Amazon where
the content it is add by professional staff but the users generate the reviews.
It is as well true that there is an unbalance of participation in all user-generated applications. Shirky
(2008) describes this as a power law distribution and provides as an example a given article of
Wikipedia, where out of a 129 contributors only six were responsible for about quarter of the edits.
He also suggests this is the way of analysing any community based on social interaction and
confronts it with the traditional bell curve distributions where the studies are based on averages.
This, he says, is not valid to study a collaborative system, because its premise is to take a
representative sample, which in collaborative communities does not exist. He then asserts that we
should be looking at the “behaviour of the collective” and the way interaction changes along the
distribution. Putting as an example weblogs he proves that the more successful a weblog is (the
more readers it has) the more difficult is to maintain a conversation and therefore interact with those
readers.
An real life example of the way individuals use this content and applications can be found in the
recent student protests in London (The Guardian, press, 2010). Without entering in the details of the
protest, what we want to analyse are the tools used by the student in order to organize themselves
(press). They used Google Maps to ping-point the position of police crew, the number of casualties
and based on that decided where to go next. This was possible because students participating in the

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demonstration were updating their social network profiles (like Twitter and Facebook) including
their location and the situation in the area. Even broadcaster companies and the police make use of
this tools on the day. Newspapers like The Guardian and TV broadcaster like Channel 4 went to
Twitter and Facebook to get an live feed of the protest and publish their analysis on their websites.
Obviously we are not implied that this new way of informing or spreading the word is going to end
with traditional journalism but, as we said before, companies are starting to use this content to
retrieve information in a quicker way and to interact with the public (BBC, 2011).
However, not everyone agree with this: Keen (2007) is very critic when analysing user-generated
content. He affirms that news-aggregation sites are “a mirror of our most banal interest” based on
the fact (as I explained previously) that the users rate the stories and based on that the front page is
generated. We have to disagree with him on this. Without entering in discussion about amateurism
and the quality of the chosen articles, news-aggregation sites are just a sample of what its users, as a
group, think is interesting. It might not be an particular individual choice of news but it definitely
provides an idea of what the people is really interested on. He makes, however, an interesting point
when talking about SNS and asserting that the reason why they exist is to be used as a platform to
promote ourselves. We live in a time when not having an online social life is synonymous of being
some sort of outcast, when we are willing to tell the world (or our online network) where we are
(via FourSquare), what we are doing (via Facebook), what kind of music we like (via Last.fm) and
so on. Probably part of the reason of doing that resides on the need that we, as human beings, have
of being noticeable and part of a group.

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References
• BBC, YouTube - Social Media and the Student Protests. Available at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8_i656bVyU [Accessed January 28, 2011].
• boyd, d.m & Ellison, N.B., 2007. Social Network sites: definition, history and scholarship.
In Online Communication and Collaboration. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 261-281.
• Cieslak, M., 2006. Rise of the web's social network. BBC News. Available at:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/click_online/5391258.stm [Accessed January 28,
2011].
• Gray, B., 1989. Collaborating: Finding common ground for multiparty problems, San
Francisco: Jassey-Bass.
• Jacques, D. & Salmon, G.,2007. Studies of group behaviour. In Online Communication and
Collaboration. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 12-25.
• Keen, A., 2007. The cult of the Amateur. In Online Communication and Collaboration.
Oxon: Routledge, pp. 261-255.
• Lind, Maria. The Collaborative Turn. In Billing, J., Lind, M. & Nilsson, L., 2007. Taking the
matter into common hands: on contemporary art and collaborative practices. London: Bacl
Dog Publishing, pp. 15 - 31.
• London, S., Collaboration and Community. Available at:
http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/ppcc.html [Accessed January 16, 2011].
• Moon, J. & Sproull, L., 2010. Essence of distributed work: the case of the Linux kernel. In
Online Communication and Collaboration. Oxon: Routledge, pp. 125-145.
• O'Reilly, 2005. What Is Web 2.0. Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next
Generation of Software. Available at: http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
[Accessed January 28, 2011].
• Shirky, C., 2008. Here comes everybody: the power of organizing without organizations,
Penguin Press. pp 109-142

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• Shirky, C., 2008. Publish, then filter. In Online Communication and Collaboration. Oxon:
Routledge, pp. 236-250.
• The Guardian, Student protests – as they happened. Available at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/blog/2010/dec/09/student-protests-live-coverage
[Accessed January 28, 2011].