Produsage: Research

I thought I'd post a quick summary here on one further direction that my research into produsage will take over the coming years. One issue that has interested me for some time (and that I touch on throughout the book) is the problem of finding ways for 'professionals' and 'amateurs' - as inadequate these terms are - to collaborate fruitfully, rather than stand in inherent opposition to one another.

The oppositional stance is visible for example in the still persistent dismissal of citizen journalists by professional journalists in the industry; in the overly defensive response of Britannica and its commercial competitors to the rise of Wikipedia; or in the lack of engagement with or outright banning of user-generated content by many educational institutions. Against this, we're seeing the emergence of what (following Leadbeater and Miller) we might describe as Pro-Am operations - OhmyNews is a good example here, but so is the harnessing of user-generated content by Amazon or Google.

I'm happy to report that the Smart Services Cooperative Research Centre has finally been launched. It's taken far too long to get to this point (initial Australian federal government approval for the CRC application was received shortly before Christmas, 2006), but after a lengthy process of negotiations between the twenty or so universities, government bodies, and industry partners involved in the CRC, the Centre has finally been launched by the federal minister responsible, Senator Kim Carr, on 3 July 2008.

Some of my colleagues at QUT are involved in a new project they describe as 'cultural science' - a combination of cultural studies, economics, and other scientific methodologies, in order to arrive at a more rigorous and testable framework for the study of cultural activity. I've posted some more about this over at snurb.info, and there's now a Cultural Science Website which has more information. I've cross-posted the following blog post on the Cultural Science blog.

I was lucky enough to attend part of the Brisbane meeting which officially kickstarted the project of cultural science, and I've been trying to trace the connections from here to my own work since then. I know little about economics, but for a couple of years before switching to media studies, I trained as a physicist, and a recent blog post by Yihong Ding has made me believe that some fields of physics, too, have valuable models to contribute to cultural science. In particular, it might be worth examining the way that particle and fluid dynamics describes the transition from random interaction at a micro level to orderly and predictable behaviour at a macro level.

But first, some background: the focus of my research is on user-led collaborative content creation, or what I've come to call produsage. One of the fundamental challenges in this field is to understand the processes of collective intelligence that arise in large-scale collaborative environments, and the conditions under which they flourish best. What makes Wikipedia work, for example? What would make it work better? What enables The Wisdom of Crowds to emerge, as James Surowiecki describes it?