Published in Information and Organization (2013) with David Ribes, Steve Jackson, Matt Burton, and Tom Finholt: Increasingly, organizations are deploying automated modes of technology-supported coordination that seek to replace rather than enhance human communication.  To study this phenomenon, we extend Bruno Latour’s concept of delegation  and apply it to thorny questions around the work of sustaining organization over space and time. As we show with two cases from the Open Science Grid, delegation is complex, fragile, and central to the nature of contemporary organizing. Specifically, we argue that delegation: 1) reconfigures the organization of work; 2) transforms how outcomes are accomplished; 3) redistributes responsibility for organizational decision-making; and 4) shifts the visibility and invisibility of both actors and their work.

Published in American Behavioral Scientist (2013) with Aaron Halfaker, Jonathan Morgan, and John Riedl: This paper presents evidence that several changes that the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face of a massive growth in participation have lead to a more restrictive environment for newcomers. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions is implicated as a cause of decreased newcomer retention. Also, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation is shown to have calcified against changes — especially for newcomers.

Published in Proceedings of WikiSym 2012 with Heather Ford: We introduce and advocate a multi-faceted theory of literacy to investigate the knowledges and organizational forms are required to improve participation in Wikipedia’s communities. We outline what Richard Darville refers to as the “background knowledges” required to be an empowered, literate member and apply this to the Wikipedia community. Using a series of examples drawn from interviews with new editors and qualitative studies of controversies in Wikipedia, we identify and outline several different literacy asymmetries.

Published in Tiny Transactions on Computer Science, Vol 1 (2012): Bots are users of systems just as humans are. HCI practitioners must not forget to design for both bot-computer and human-bot interaction.

Published in Proceedings of alt.CHI 2012 with Yoon Jung Jeong and Emily Manders: We introduce IP over Xylophone Players (IPoXP), a novel Internet protocol between two computers using xylophone-based Arduino interfaces. In our implementation, human operators are situated within the lowest layer of the network, transmitting data between computers by striking designated keys. We discuss how IPoXP inverts the traditional mode of human-computer interaction, with a computer using the human as an interface to communicate with another computer.

Published in Proceedings of WikiSym 2011 with Heather Ford: We find that Wikipedia’s deletion process is heavily frequented by a relatively small number of longstanding users. The vast majority of such deleted articles are not spam, vandalism, or “patent nonsense,” but rather articles which could be considered encyclopedic, but do not fit the project‟s standards.

Published in Wikipedia: A Critical Point of View (2011): I describe the complex social and technical environment in which bots exist in Wikipedia, emphasizing not only how bots produce order and enforce rules, but also how humans produce bots and negotiate rules around their operation.

Published in Proceedings of HICSS 2011 with David Ribes: We detail the methodology of ‘trace ethnography’, which combines the richness of participant-observation with the wealth of data in logs so as to reconstruct patterns and practices of users in distributed sociotechnical systems

Published in Proceedings of CSCW 2010 with David Ribes: This paper traces out a heterogeneous network of humans and non-humans involved in the identification and banning of a single vandal in Wikipedia.

Published in gnovis 10.1 (2009): Habermasians have been debating about the role of the Internet in the public sphere, but they have all taken for granted the highly-automated software infrastructures that mediate our knowledge of the blogosphere.

Published in Proceedings of WikiSym 2009: A short paper showing the recent explosive growth of automated editors (or bots) in Wikipedia, which have taken on many new tasks in administrative spaces.