Unreliable Collaborators: Coordination in distributed volunteer teams

Drawing together the interest, skills and resources of individuals to pursue productive activity is the cornerstone of wealth creation. Recently, new forms of productive activity have emerged that draw together highly motivated, often volunteer, participants to collaborate through low-cost information systems to produce high quality products that rival those produced by wealthy firms and markets. Examples include free (libr´e) and open source software (FLOSS), such as Linux, and collaboratively edited texts, such as Wikipedia and the Open Directory. There is an opportunity to study these novel activities, to understand their organization, in order to both further their continued success and to assess whether and which of their novel organization techniques might be used in wider domains of human collaborative activity.