CDSC Welcomes Dionna, Loizos, and Thaty!

We’re excited to welcome Dionna Taylor, Loizos Bitsikokos, and Thaty (pronounced Tatchi) Andrade Nunes as new core student members of CDSC!

Dionna is a first year MA/PhD student in the Communication Department at the University of Washington, being advised by Mako. She earned her B.A. in Psychology and Communication (also from UW) and is interested in the intersection of human behavior and technology, with a primary focus on online community collapse and online healthcare spaces. In her free time, you can find her reading, line dancing, or traveling.

Loizos is a PhD student at Purdue University’s Brian Lamb School of Communication. His academic journey began with degrees in physics and applied mathematics from the National Technical University of Athens (N.T.U.A.), followed by an MA in computational social science from the University of Chicago, focusing on sociology. His research lies at the intersection of computational social science, online platforms, and organizations. He’s particularly interested in the intricate relationship between algorithms and society. He also studies the tensions between structure and agency within online platforms, examining how platforms influence identity formation and whether users can resist institutionally ingrained biases. His work investigates the conceptualization of desire within platform infrastructures. When he has free time outside of academia, Loizos enjoys writing poems, making and collecting zines, watching cinema, taking photographs, walking in nature, and occasionally playing the saxophone.

Thaty (pronounced like Tatchi) is a first-year PhD student in the Media, Technology, and Society program at Northwestern University, advised by Professor Aaron Shaw. Her interest in studying online communities began while working at game companies in South Korea. In addition to creating social media videos, she was responsible for organizing engaging community events and managing online communities. She was fascinated by how quickly these communities could self-organize, whether by creating guides, wikis, or establishing their own rules and moderation systems. Thaty wants to investigate how communication and information technologies influence social outcomes, how online communities influence participants, what kind of participants (lurkers or active) join them, and why and how they contribute. She’s also interested in the different forms of community engagement such as collaboration, political mobilization, and organization. She’s originally from Brazil, lived in South Korea for seven years, and speaks Portuguese, English, Korean, and some Spanish! In her free time, she enjoys playing story-driven video games, watching horror movies/series, and spending time with friends

Professor Floor Fiers!

Dr. Floor Fiers and proud faculty mentor Aaron Shaw.
Floor and Aaron just before Northwestern’s doctoral hooding ceremony.

A very special congratulations to CDSC member Floor Fiers on the completion of their Ph.D. in Media, Technology & Society at Northwestern!

Floor’s dissertation Chasing the Ideal and Making It Work: Pursuing Employment in the Remote Gig Economy, seeks to understand inequality among workers in the gig economy and how they navigate the precarity involved in remote gig work. Several of the chapters have already appeared as standalone, peer-reviewed publications, but there’s plenty of new, exciting, and as-yet-unpublished material in there as well.

This week (!), Floor will begin a position as Assistant Professor in the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam.

Since I (Aaron) am posting this one myself, it seems appropriate to add that it’s been wonderful working with Floor over the past five+ years. Indeed, I’m still in denial about the fact that Floor won’t be physically present in our lab meetings this year. At the same time, I couldn’t be happier for Floor and definitely get a goofy, proud-faculty-mentor grin on my face whenever I think about the incredible things they’ve accomplished already (nevermind all the cool stuff yet to come).

Congratulations again, Floor!

Come See Us at FOSSY!

Interested in free and open source software? Want to hear insights from researchers, community leaders, contributors, and advocates working on and with FOSS?

Join us next weekend at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference!

We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. We’re excited to have a number of awesome presenters speaking about their work. Check out the schedule below:

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

Collaborations between practitioners and researchers can be transformative! Let’s get to know each other.

Tickets are still available at every price tier, check them out here.

We hope to see you there!

Academic Year-in-review (2023-2024) and celebration!

CDSC group photo from Fall, 2023 at Northwestern
CDSC group photo taken at Northwestern in Fall, 2023

We love celebrating the accomplishments of CDSC lab and community members! Here’s a less-than-complete, not-quite-brief summary of some of those accomplishments over the past academic year+ (since the last time we wrote a post like this). Congratulations to everyone involved—including those members of the CDSC community not named below. It truly takes a village to do all of these things and we appreciate the achievements and contributions of all.

Awards, degrees, and fellowships:

  • Hazel Chiu received a Top Paper Award from the International Communication Association (ICA) Communication and Technology (CaT) Division for “User Acceptance of Multiple Accounts Management on SNS: A Technology Acceptance Model Perspective.”
  • Nathan TeBlunthuis received a Top Paper Award from the ICA Computational Methods (CM) Division for “Misclassification in Automated Content Analysis Causes Bias in Regression. Can We Fix It? Yes We Can!.”
  • Dyuti Jha and Ryan Funkhouser were named runners-up for the National Communication Association (NCA) Sam Keltner Top Student paper for “Freedom to flourish: A systematic review of the literature at the intersection of resilience, communication, and peacebuilding.”
  • Floor Fiers completed their Ph.D. and will begin a new role as an Assistant Professor of Communication at the University of Amsterdam.
  • Nathan TeBlunthuis will begin a new role as an Assistant Professor in the Information School at the University of Texas, Austin.
  • Tommy Rousse completed his J.D. and MTS Ph.D. at Northwestern.
  • Sohyeon Hwang will begin a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Center for Information Technology & Policy (CITP) at Princeton University in the Fall.
  • Yibin Fan completed a Master’s degree in Communication at the University of Washington.
  • Benjamin Mako Hill was a fellow at CITP at Princeton University during 2023-2024.
  • Emily Zou graduated with honors from Northwestern in American Studies with her thesis, “`Did Bro Just Grief the US Government?’: How online community identities create new genres of political communication.” Starting in the Fall, Emily will begin a Ph.D. in Communication at Stanford University.
  • Carolyn Zou graduated with honors from Northwestern in Communication Studies with their thesis, “Sociotechnical Risks of Simulating Humans with Language Model Agents.” Starting in the Fall, Carolyn will begin a Ph.D. in Computer Science at Stanford University.
  • Carolyn Zou was awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP).

Publications:

Members of the lab published more than 15 papers and articles. This is too many to list here, but you should check our publications page for more.

Talks and conference presentations:

Members of the group gave way too many presentations to list.

Select venues include: Seattle GNU/Linux Conference (SeaGL); Free and Open Source Software Yearly Conference (FOSSY); PyCon; Wikimania; the Annual Meeting of the International Communication Association (ICA); the Annual Meeting of the National Communication Association (NCA); the ACM Conferences CSCW and CHI; the Yale Internet & Society Project; the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University; Stanford University HCI Speaker Series; University of Maryland, College Park; Rutgers University; Cornell Tech, Digital Life Institute; Learning Planet Institute, Paris; the University of Pennsylvania, Annenberg School for Communication; The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center in Bellagio, Italy; and the Stanford Trust & Safety Research Conference, the IEEE International Conferences on Weblogs and Social Media (ICWSM) and Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER).

Teaching:

A selection of the courses taught or TA’ed by members of the group in the past year include:

  • Introduction to Communication
  • Introduction to Programming and Data Science
  • Public speaking
  • Online communities
  • History & theories of information
  • Social Network Analysis
  • Communication technology & politics

Many of these are available via our workshops and classes page.

Events:

Members of the group planned, hosted, or otherwise played leadership roles in the following events:

  • The CDSC Science of Community Dialogues Series
  • The Northwestern Center for HCI+Design Thought-Leader Dialogue Series
  • Free Open Source Software Yearly (FOSSY) Conference, Science of Community Track (2023 and 2024).
  • The Decentralized Social Media Workshop, Princeton University
  • Hongerige Wolf Festival (“Science” branch)

Other career and degree milestones:

  • Madison Deyo joined the group as Program Coordinator!
  • Molly de Blanc began a Ph.D. in Media, Technology, and Society at Northwestern.
  • Haomin Lin and Matt Gaughan joined the CDSC at UW and Northwestern respectively.
  • Carl Colglazier, Ryan Funkhouser, and Zarine Kharazian passed their general/preliminary/qualifying exams.
  • Charlie Kiene completed an internship at Amazon.

Meet us at FOSSY!

The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is less than a month away and we will be there!

We will be running the Science of Community track on Friday August 2nd and Saturday August 3rd. Check out the full schedule here.

We’re excited to have a number of really amazing speakers presenting their work. Check out the list below:

Kaylea and Matt will be presenting again!

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which aim to bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we get so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations focus on how that work related to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

We hope to see you at FOSSY. Even if you can’t make it to our sessions, we’ll be at the conference so stop by and say hello!

FOSSY 2024: Submission Deadline Extended!

Worried you didn’t submit your FOSSY proposal on time? Well fear not, the deadline has been extended to Tuesday, June 18th. Submit your proposal today!

Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join us at the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) this summer!

We’ll be running the Science of Community track, and are looking for presenters to speak to an audience of FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people just generally into and curious about FOSS. 

FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki.

Recording of Thought-leader dialogue: Decentralizing social media

A couple of weeks ago, I moderated a “Thought leader dialogue” panel on “Decentralizing Social Media” co-hosted by the Northwestern Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D) and the Community Data Science Collective.

The (extraordinary!) panelists were Jaz-Michael King (IFTAS), Christine Lemmer-Webber (Spritely Institute), and Bryan Newbold (BlueSky). The discussion ranged far and wide over some key background on decentralized and federated social media as well as some urgent challenges and opportunities in the space.

The recording of the session is up and you can watch it here (or in the frame below).

Thanks to the panelists, Madison Deyo, and the HCI+D team for making this happen!

Book Review: The Conversational Firm

New hires from the rank-and-file arguing with the CEO in public. Employee-chosen projects and a management team reluctant to say no. Few if any written rules. No offices. Staff arriving and departing when they choose. Messes everywhere. Some companies—especially technology firms—describe their ways of working as remaking the model of the modern business. They describe ways of working that were unthinkable some years ago. But has anything really changed from the organization models of the past, or are these features mostly hype and marketing obscuring the same old bureaucracy and hierarchy?

Although not a Communication scholar, sociologist Catherine J. Turco’s work offers vital insight into how communication structures are reordering relationships, with significant implications for the field and discipline of Communication. In this brief and readable ethnographic study, Turco describes ‘TechCo,’ a social media marketing company, in rich detail. TechCo employees have access to the perks and features familiar to those who study firms in Silicon Valley — hack nights, freedom to experiment, flexible schedules, an open floor plan, a “dogs welcome” policy, free beer, and so on. The company seeks to embody its own industry: positioning itself as open, freewheeling, and engaged, just like the social media platforms they help their customers to use. Beyond this external branding, the founders have made an explicit goal internally: to create a company that is intentionally more `open’ and less hierarchical than traditional firms. How is this goal accomplished—and is it indeed accomplished at all?

Turco’s answer to this question is that these companies accomplish half of this goal. Companies are indeed able to deliberately open their communication, including the disclosure of financial details that in many firms is held exclusively by C-level leadership, as well as allowing for frank, public feedback from rank and file staff to executive leadership. However, they do so while leaving their hierarchical structure for decisionmaking largely intact. Turco argues that staff are satisfied by this arrangement—and in fact prefer to have decisionmaking power left in the hands of executives.

Drawing from theoretical background stretching from Max Weber to Albert Hirschmann to Sherry Turkle, Turco elaborates a theory of the conversational firm. In the conversational firm, voice and decision making power are intentionally decoupled. Therefore, these two factors can be analyzed distinctly and in tension with one another. This poses a particular challenge to lines of research which treat voice and authority as intertwined or interchangeable.

Communication scholars may find much to reflect on in her careful articulation of what is meant by and accomplished by the idea of “openness” in a firm, from her exploration of how employee use of social media can both benefit and harm a firm, and her case study of how efforts to brand and disseminate company culture can be both a marketing boon and an internal headache.

The book opens with conversations with the founders of TechCo and their desire for “radical openness” (p. 2) and anti-bureaucratic approach to structure. Turco describes the company’s experiences with openness and anti-bureaucratic tendencies from a range of perspectives: as reflected in the experiences of an eager young woman who is new to the workforce, as observed in Hack Nights, as visible within the company’s rollicking wiki discussions about everything from financial information to kitchen cleanup duties, and in their grappling with a lack of strict policies (instead, TechCo asks employees to “Use Good Judgment'”).

Through the first three chapters, Turco asks what this openness means, and finds that although the founders’ goal is to be transparent and less hierarchical than traditional firms, hierarchy remains and is even desired by employees: instead, what’s truly different about TechCo is its embrace of employee perspectives, and the employees’ trust that the firm will take them into account. Through long-running discussions on the company wiki and chat platforms, town hall meetings and cross-departmental dinners, we see frank conversations unfold and influence the direction of the company. Turco also observes that employees seem to primarily seek to be heard—they don’t have, and often don’t want, decision rights: they want and receive voice rights.

Turco concludes that despite the findings of prior work that bureaucracy is largely indestructible and reproduces itself, openness in communication allows greater freedom for employees, at least bending the bars of what Weber called the iron cage. The book returns to the limitations of anti-bureaucratic approaches throughout the text, with a series of examples in Chapter Six navigating the limitations of this openness: how the company came to have a traditional human resources department despite the founders’ repeated public expressions of distate for formal HR and concerns about noise, mess, and distraction in open ‘officeless’ seating plans.

In chapter four, Turco turns attention away from TechCo’s internal dialog and to the relationship between TechCo and external audiences—in particular, the absence of a social media policy. Unlike other firms which have strict rules for how employees comport themselves on social media—and the risk that the company faces from public response to employee behavior and disclosures—here again TechCo emphasizes their “Use Good Judgment” guideline. When employees make mistakes that reflect poorly on the company, TechCo’s response is to treat this as a learning opportunity, turning the event into training materials to shape employee understanding of what good judgment looks like (and doesn’t look like).

Chapter five offers a case study of TechCo’s external communication about their company culture. The founders disseminated a `manifesto’ that combined both their beliefs about TechCo’s culture and their beliefs about how companies should be organized to succeed in the current era. Although the document received extensive positive attention and served as a recruiting tool, existing employees were troubled by gaps between their experience and the company’s description of its culture. Employees also voiced the irony of a document developed in a top-down way describing a participatory and bottom-up culture. Satisfaction plummets. Over time, however, continuing conversation about the document and making revisions to it seems to allow employees to regain their sense of voice, eventually resolving the crisis.

Published in 2016 from fieldwork that ended in 2013, this account does not allow us to see how the conversational firm fared during recent events that have disrupted the structure, functioning, and culture of organizations—e.g. the isolation of Covid-19 pandemic, the migration to remote work, and questions about returning to the office.

In elaborating a theory of how firms can be conversational, decoupling decisionmaking power and voice, the book offers a useful framework for scholars examining the future of work and organizations, as well as other topics of enduring interest in Communication: the shifting relationship between firms and publics and the continued blurring of the public and the private in social media. Of key interest is the extent to which Communication theories about voice, the constitutive power of communication, and factors such as concertive control can be applied to these organizations.

Graduate students with an interest in ethnographic methods will find particular value in the blunt personal narratives that comprise an extended methodological appendix. Turco describes the process of gaining access to the company, gathering observations and interview data, and iteratively analyzing her notes and memos, all of which will be familiar to many. However, this section is unique in offering a series of self-critical reflections on the work of organizational ethnography, explicit description of the personal toll the work exacted from her, and the sometimes painful experience of receiving feedback from her subjects as the analysis emerged.

Ultimately, Turco argues that embracing open communication in firms is a transformative way forward. While we in Communication may agree, what remains for us is to investigate what it means: for how we understand voice in organizations and how we assess the role of technology and platforms for communication.

FOSSY 2024: Call for Proposals!

Does your work touch open source, communities, technology, or cooperation? Do you want to help bridge the gaps between research and practice? Join us at FOSSY! The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is back this summer and the call for proposals is open!

We’ll be running the Science of Community track, and are looking for presenters to speak to an audience of FOSS practitioners, developers, community organizers, contributors, and people just generally into and curious about FOSS. 

The Science of Community track is inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, which bring together practitioners and researchers to discuss scholarly work that is relevant to the efforts of practitioners. As researchers, we benefit so much from the communities we work with and study and we want them to also learn from the research they so generously take part in. While the Dialogues cover a broad range of topics and communities, FOSSY presentations will focus on how that work relates to free and open source software communities, projects, and practitioners.

FOSSY is a low-stress opportunity to talk to people who your work can benefit. For topics, consider presenting implications from past papers, synthesizing work from your field overall, or floating ideas and problems (lightning talks! long talks! short talks!). A full track description and answers to common questions is available on our wiki.

The CFP deadline is June 14th and uses this form.

Decentralizing Social Media: The challenges and opportunities of federated systems

A Virtual Thought Leader Dialogue on May 23, from 4 – 5:15 p.m. CST. Register here to join.

Based on File:Decentralization.jpg, by Adam Aladdin, CC-BY-SA 3.0

How can we create more trustworthy and accountable social media that support diverse communities? Decentralized social media—systems that allow users to connect and communicate across independent services like Mastodon or BlueSky—offer promising alternatives to centralized commercial platforms like Instagram, TikTok, or X. However, decentralized social media also face urgent design challenges, especially when it comes to content integrity, protecting community trust and safety, and forging collective governance. What happens when there is no central authority to review posts or ban abusive users? How can networks of autonomous communities build and adopt systems to govern effectively? What critical infrastructure can prevent the pervaisve harms of existing social media and support the integrity of public discourse?

Join Northwestern’s Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D) and the Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) for an engaging conversation about the challenges and opportunites of decentralized social media on May 23rd from 4 to 5:15 p.m. CST. This panel features designers, leaders, and researchers involved in federated social media and will address opportunities for effective design and governance in this space.

Panelists include Jaz-Michael King, Bryan Newbold, and Christine Lemmer-Webber. Short presentations will be followed by discussion and Q&A moderated by Aaron Shaw (Northwestern HCI+D, CDSC). 

Moderator: Aaron Shaw, photograph by Nikki Ritcher Photography

Aaron Shaw is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Sociology (by courtesy) at Northwestern University and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He is a co-founder of the Community Data Science Collective. At Northwestern, he is also affiliated with the Center for Human-Computer Interaction + Design (HCI+D), the Institute for Policy Research, the Buffett Institute for Global Affairs, and the Public Affairs Residential College.

Speaker: Christine Lemmer-Webber, Executive Director of Spritely Networked Communities Institute

Christine has devoted her life to advancing user freedom. Realizing that the federated social web was fractured by a variety of incompatible protocols, she co-authored and shepherded ActivityPub‘s standardization. She has also contributed to many other free and open source projects, including co-founding MediaGoblin.

Christine established the open source Spritely Project to solve known problems in existing centralized and decentralized social media platforms and to re-imagine the way we build networked applications – work that now continues here at the institute under her guidance as Executive Director.

Speaker: Jaz-Michael King, Executive Director of IFTAS (Federated Trust & Safety)

An accomplished professional with an extraordinary record of enabling data-driven decisions, developing innovative products, creating new business opportunities, driving strong operational performance, and building high-performing, agile teams.
Highly versatile, with extensive experience in data and technology from a privacy, improvement, and reporting perspective, Jaz has a proven record in building solutions for non-profit programs. 
As Executive Director of IFTAS, Jaz is now focused on independent, open Social Web activities, with the aim of creating #BetterSocialMedia by supporting trust and safety at scale in federated social media networks.

Speaker: Bryan Newbold, Protocol Engineer at BlueSky

Bryan works at Bluesky, a startup company building a federated social media protocol called “atproto”. Until a few months ago he worked at the Internet Archive collecting scientific research datasets and publications, and created scholar.archive.org. And before that he worked on infrastructure at Stripe, attended the Recurse Center in New York City, and built Atomic Magnetometers for a small New Jersey company called Twinleaf.

Over that same time period, Bryan climbed up and down the ladder of abstraction, obtaining an undergraduate degree in physics (at MIT), operating under-ice robots in Antarctica, developing open hardware lab instrumentation for large-scale brain probing (at LeafLabs), cataloging hundreds of millions of electronics components (at Octopart), and improved production service reliability at Stripe (a financial infrastructure start-up).

Bryan is a transplant from the East Coast and enjoys the road biking, large trees, generous salads, used bookstores, and world-class tech non-profits. This will be his third year serving on the Code of Conduct team at DWeb Camp.

Interested in attending? Register here to join!