Congratulations to Aarjav Chauhan on winning an Honourable Mention in the Best Paper award category at CSCW this year! Accepted papers are reviewed separately by an awards committee and only a few – the top 5% of all papers submitted to CSCW – are chosen for this recognition.
Aarjav’s paper, “Value Tensions in OpenStreetMap: Openness, Membership, and Policy in Online Communities”, captures some super important dynamics in the OSM community in a way that is faithful to the research setting but also very broadly relevant to social computing researchers who have no direct interest in the platform.
Aarjav is currently a PhD Student at the University of Toronto in the Department of Computer Science working on human-computer interaction, the commons, and climate adaptation practices. His research examines the ways technologies and online communities can be designed as commons to support the democratic production of knowledge through collaborative efforts.
At CSCW, I will be presenting our paper titled “Value Tensions in OpenStreetMap: Openness, Membership, and Policy in Online Communities”. My co-authors for this research project were Taneea Agrawaal, Dipto Sarkar, and Robert Soden. In this study, we examined and shed light to the community held values and tensions within them that emerged due to rising corporate influence within the peer-production community – OpenStreetMap (OSM). Our research shows the dynamic nature of community held values. Values are continuously contested and contextualized within online community debates. Furthermore, we discuss the tension between openness and democratization in the knowledge commons, the challenges of amorphous membership in a peer production community, and the importance of robust conflict resolution processes in the knowledge commons to navigate value conflicts and tensions. – Aarjav
Aarjav’s paper is just one of five papers and a workshop we have next week at CSCW!