The paper concerns the development of digitally-mediated technologies that value social cooperation as a common good rather than as a source of revenue and accumulation. The paper discusses the activities that shaped a European participatory design project which aims to develop a digital space that promotes and facilitates the 'Commonfare', a complementary approach to social welfare. The paper provides and discusses concrete examples of design artifacts to address a key question about the role of co-and participatory design in developing hybrid spaces that nurture sharing and autonomous cooperation: how can co-design practices promote alternatives to the commodification of digitallymediated cooperation? The paper argues for a need to focus on relational, social, political and ethical values, and highlights the potential power of co-and participatory design processes to achieve this. In summary, the paper proposes that only by reasserting the centrality of shared values and capacities, rather than individual needs or problems, co-design can reposition itself thereby encouraging autonomous cooperation.
Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games (MMORPGs) are a sub-sector of virtual worlds that share with other worlds the characteristics of both complex technological systems and complex societies. The success of several MMORPGs makes them a vibrant area for research from different points of view, including their economic aspects (Castronova, 2005). Our research is mainly concerned with thepractice of cheating in MMORPGs and its consequences. In this paper we explore the economic dimensions of cheating in MMORPGs as they relate to the business activities of companies that offer cheating software, inparticular programs called 'bots'. Specifically, we address the following question: "How do cheating practices shape economic interactions around MMORPGs?" We characterize the economy of cheating (as it is carried out by cheating companies) as an answer to breakdowns in the relationship between cheaters and cheating companies (Winograd and Flores, 1987; Akrich, 1992), which involves both learning and innovation processes. In order to answer our question we present a case study of the Tibia (http://www.tibia.com) and an ongoing anti-cheating campaign. In the conclusion of the paper we provide some general reflections on the relevance of the economy of cheating to Virtual Worlds research.
WikiRate is a Collective Awareness Platform for Sustainability and Social Innovation (CAPS) project with the aim of "crowdsourcing better companies" through analysis of their Environmental Social and Governance (ESG) performance. Research to inform the design of the platform involved surveying the current corporate ESG information landscape, and identifying ways in which an open approach and peer production ethos could be effectively mobilised to improve this landscape's fertility. The key requirement identified is for an open public repository of data tracking companies' ESG performance. Corporate Social Responsibility reporting is conducted in public, but there are barriers to accessing the information in a standardised analysable format. Analyses of and ratings built upon this data can exert power over companies' behaviour in certain circumstances, but the public at large have no access to the data or the most influential ratings that utilise it. WikiRate aims to build an open repository for this data along with tools for analysis, to increase public demand for the data, allow a broader range of stakeholders to participate in its interpretation, and in turn drive companies to behave in a more ethical manner. This paper describes the quantitative Metrics system that has been designed to meet those objectives and some early examples of its use.
The purpose of this paper is to further the debate on Knowledge Artifacts, by presenting the design of WikiRate, a Collective Awareness platform whose goal is to support a wider public contributing to the generation of knowledge on Ethical, Social and Governance performance of companies. • Approach: The material presented in the paper comes from first-hand experience of the authors as part of the WikiRate design team. This material is reflexively discussed using concepts from the field of Science and Technology Studies. • Findings: Using the concept of the 'funnel of interest' we discuss how the design of a Knowledge Artifact like WikiRate relies on the designers' capacity to translate general statements into particular design solutions. We also show how this funnelling helps understanding the interplay between situativity and objectivity in a Knowledge Artifact. We show how WikiRate is a peerproduction platform based on situativity, which requires a robust level of objectivity for producing reliable knowledge about the Ethical, Social and Governance performance of companies. • Originality/value: This paper furthers the debate on KAs. It presents a relevant design example and offers in the discussion a set of design and community building recommendations to practitioners.
License compliance in Free and Open Source Software development is a significant issue today and organizations using free and open source software are predominately focusing on this issue. The noncompliance to licenses in free and open source software development leads to the loss of reputation and the high costs of litigation for organizations. Towards an automated compliance management, we use the Open Digital Rights Language to implement the clauses of open source software licenses in a machine interpretable way and propose a novel algorithm that analyzes compatibility between free and open source software licenses. Also, we describe a framework that inductively manages compliance of license clauses in a free and open source software development. We simulate and evaluate the formalized license compliance management by analyzing a real-time open source software project GRASS.
This paper explores governance in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs), one sub-sector of the digital games industry. Informed by media governance studies, Surveillance Studies, and game studies, this paper identifies five elements which form part of the system of governance in MMOGs. These elements are: game code and rules; game policies; company community management practices; player participatory practices; and paratexts. Together these governance elements function as a surveillant assemblage, which relies to varying degrees on lateral and hierarchical forms of surveillance, and the assembly of human and nonhuman elements.Using qualitative mixed methods we examine and compare how these elements operate in three commercial MMOGs: Eve Online, World of Warcraft and Tibia. While peer and participatory surveillance elements are important, we identified two major trends in the governance of disruptive behaviours by the game companies in our case studies. Firstly, an increasing reliance on automated forms of dataveillance to control and punish game players, and secondly, increasing recourse to contract law and diminishing user privacy rights. Game players found it difficult to appeal the changing terms and conditions and they turned to creating paratexts outside of the game in an attempt to negotiate the boundaries of the surveillant assemblage. In the wider context of self-regulated governance systems these trends highlight the relevance of consumer rights, privacy, and data protection legislation to online games and the usefulness of bringing game studies and Surveillance Studies into dialogue.
The conceptual malleability of the notion of social innovation has resulted in the appropriation of the concept in various sectors. The goal of the paper is to provide a critical view of such appropriation. We contend that this appropriation often includes the usage of the concept to advance agendas away from or opposed to that of the common good. This paper evaluates such problematic usage by identifying the distinguishing and core aspects of social innovation. These include the social need-meeting dimension geared towards marginalised or disadvantaged communities which is enacted via processes of social and/or power relations shifts of these groups. The paper locates the current trajectory of social innovation discourse to identify that it is in the actions of grassroots third sector initiatives, where the democratic side of social innovation is conserved, and calls for its advancement to prevent exploitation of disadvantaged communities and hogging of resources away from initiatives that are committed to it.
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