Benjamin Mako Hill

Applications in Social Sciences
Communication

I study collective action in online communities and seek to understand why some attempts at collaborative production — like Wikipedia and Linux — build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. I am particularly interested in how the design of communication and information technologies shape fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications — like the decision to join a community or contribute to a public good. My research is deeply interdisciplinary, consists primarily of “big data” quantitative analyses, and lies at the intersection of communication, human-computer interaction, and sociology.