Crowdsourcing and Anarchy

 This week in EME 6414 I spent some time reading about the formation of online communities for the a paper we had for the class. One article that I found particularly interesting was from N.J. Foss How Context and Attention Shape Behavior in Online Communities. While Foss spent the article discussing the open software online communities surrounding popular technologies, one of the things that I found most interesting was the theory that he drew upon to understand the formation of heirarchy within these communities. Foss describes these communities as organized through a means of organized anarchy, where no one really knows how things are suppose to be organized but they find a way to organize anyway. Mostly this takes place through the conversation of energy and also the prestiget that comes with providing an answer to a question that is stumping the rest of the community. However, when someone already knows the answer to the question or has worked on something similar it is very low energy expenditure for them to provide a solution. Thus even someone who only logs in to the system every so often becomes valuable to the overall whole when they notice something similar to a project they have worked on and struggled with. This sort of a situation may also be a little unique in that there is not the same level of concern about disinformation in an open software online tech community. Sure, someone could give incorrect information on the site, but as soon as they did so someone would point out that the solution that they offered to the software problem in fact did not work. Thus, while I think similar systems of heirarchy would form in all crowdsourced platforms, I think other sites would need to come up with better ways of determining a correct answer.