Vortrag im Rahmen der 60. Innsbrucker Gender Lecture, 03.12.2019, Universität Innsbruck

1. OFFENHEIT ALS ORGANISATIONSPRINZIP
Offen für Diversität oder Exklusion durch Offenheit?
Leonhard Dobusch
Institut für Organisation und Lernen
60. Innsbrucker Gender Lecture
03.12.2019, Universität Innsbruck

2. Offenheit als Organisationsprinzip

3. 11 EIRMA SIG III, 2005-10-20
Closed innovation
Our current
market
Our new
market
Other firm´s
market
Open innovation
External technology
insourcing
Internal
technology base
External technology base
Stolen with pride from Prof Henry Chesbrough UC Berkeley, Open Innovation: Renewing Growth from
Industrial R&D, 10th Annual Innovation Convergence, Minneapolis Sept 27, 2004
Internal/external
venture handling
Licence, spin
out, divest

4. a lesser extent in the arts and humanities).
0
50
100
150
200
250
2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
All SSCI B/M
Figure 1.2 Growth of publications on open innovation in Web of Science
Notes: Search criterion: “open innovation” in title, abstract or keyword or citing Chesbrough (2003a); All = SCI,
SSCI and A&HCI; SSCI = Social Science Citation Index; B/M = Business or Management category (within SSCI)

5. Visitenkarte
Digitale Offenheit: Unternehmen
Beispiel: Buffer

6. Visitenkarte
Werkzeug
Digitale Offenheit: Unternehmen

7. Bild: Chris Potter, CC-BY 2.0, https://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/8334443952
Visitenkarte
Werkzeug
Haltung
Digitale Offenheit: Unternehmen

8. Offenheit als Programm

10. “Offene Formen der Strategiefindung
mit mehr nach innen
und Außen sowie mehr von
internen und externen AkteurInnen.
Whittington et al. (2011, S.
531, Übersetzung L.D.)
Transparenz
Inklusion

11. Umfrage Dialog WertungInformation
Transparenz Inklusion

12. Inklusion Inklusion≠

13. Wie verhält sich Offenheit zu Diversität?

15. Umfrage unter 5.500 Open-Source-
Entwicklern auf Github:
95% männlich, 3% weiblich
(Zum Vergleich: ~20% aller
professionellen EntwicklerInnen
in den USA sind weiblich)
Quellen: http://opensourcesurvey.org/2017/; https://www.wired.com/2017/06/diversity-open-source-even-worse-tech-overall/

19. Quelle: http://www.taz.de/!5127514/

20. Quelle: http://derstandard.at/2000022296889/Studie-Wikipedia-wird-vom-reichen-Westen-dominiert

21. Quelle: http://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/leben/gesellschaft/Der-Schwarm-bei-Wikipedia-schrumpft/story/11486176

22. Paradoxe Performativität von Offenheit?

23. Bild ShashiBellamkonda, CC BY 2.0, : https://www.flickr.com/photos/drbeachvacation/4623702054/

24. Non-performatives
describes the “reiterative
and citational practice by
which discourse” does not
produce “the effects that it
names” (Butler 1993: 2)
“
Ahmed, S. (2012, p. 117)

25. Wieso ist „offen für Alle“ nicht offen genug?

26. Exkludierende Offenheit

28. “Nicht-anonym
Beitragende waren
aggressiver als
anonym Beitragenden
Rost et al. (2016): Digital Social Norm
Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social
Media, http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/
journal.pone.0155923, Übersetzung L.D.

30. Fehlende Vielfalt trotz radikaler Offenheit?
wegen

31. Bild: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Being_any_Gender_is_a_drag_-_World_Pride_London_2012_(7527764372).jpg,, CC BY 2.0, by xJason.Rogersx
Spiegelbild gesellschaftlicher (Geschlechter-)Verhältnisse?

32. Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_Zero_1_Mumbai_Guy_on_phone.jpg
Spiegelbild gesellschaftlicher (Geschlechter-)Verhältnisse?

33. Usability: Wiki-Syntax
Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editing_Wikipedia_p_11,_wiki_markup_illustration_1.png

34. 0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
editcountinpercentperyearineachusergroup
Anonymous users Bots
Registered users
Mehr Edits von
Algorithmen
(»Bots«):
Aus: Müller-Birn, C./Dobusch, L./Herbsleb, J. D. (2013): Work-to-
rule: the emergence of algorithmic governance in Wikipedia.
Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Communities
and Technologies (C&T ’13), ACM, 80–89.

35. Wenn Deine Gruppe aus
neun hilfreichen und
höflichen Mitgliedern und
einem unhöflichen,
sexistischen und lauten
Mitglied besteht, dann
werden die meisten Frauen
wegen dieses einen
Mitglieds fernbleiben.
“
Valeria Aurora (2002), http://tldp.org/
HOWTO/Encourage-Women-Linux-
HOWTO/, Übersetzung L.D.

36. Pfadabhängigkeit (fehlender) Diversität?
Quelle: Sydow et al. (2009, p. 692)

37. Wikipedia-
spezifisch
Gesamt-
gesellschaftlich
Geschlossenheit
Mögliche Gründe
für Exklusion
in Wikipedia
Hackerkultur
Trolle
»Bots«
0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
editcountinpercentperyearineachusergroup
Anonymous users Bots
Registered users
Figure 3: Development of edits per user group (registered user,
anonymous user, bot) in the Wikipedia’s administrative names-
pace 4.
continuously increasing in number. Since bots have shown their
usefulness for a wide variety of tasks in the main namespace, their
scope has steadily expanded, and more edits have taken place in
other namespaces.
This contradicts a community guideline that suggests the avoidance
of editing activities of bots outside the article namespace. However,
in 2012, these “outside” edits accounted for over 40 percent of all
bot edits. This emergence of bot activity all over the community
project is an indication of the growing importance of these “lit-
tle helpers” for the community’s activities. This relates to a study
that analyzed the diversification of human edits over the different
namespaces. In 2001, about 90 percent of all edits were carried
out in the article namespace, but in 2006, this number had already
decreased to 70 percent [15]. We assume that the change in the
community engagement of bot operators also expanded the reach
of bot edits. More interestingly, while human edits slowed down in
Wikipedia’s community space, edits carried out by bots increased
as shown in Figure 3. In this administrative space, 20 different bots
have been active on average (disregarding wikilink-bots).
In the next part of our analysis, we specifically look at the types of
activities bots carry out. Our interest is twofold: first, we classify
tasks executed by bots in order to understand their relatedness to
existing social governance mechanisms. Second, we examine our
assumption of increasingly algorithmic rule enforcement by bots.
We collected task descriptions from bots’ user pages to examine
the kinds of activities in which bots are participating in the Wiki-
pedia community. In single, doubtful cases we matched edits with
their task descriptions to identify discrepancies and exclude those
activities. Based on these data, we defined general activity types
that are indicated in the first column of the table 1. These general
activity types were defined in three steps. During the first round,
we coded existing task descriptions collaboratively (around 100)
until we had an almost stable set of activities. In the second round,
we separately coded the remaining task descriptions. In the third
round, we checked the assigned codes and compared them with
our own decisions, and collaboratively coded all task descriptions
that needed new activity types. In order to create a shared under-
standing of existing activity types, the second and third rounds were
an iterative process. Newly introduced activity types were always
cross-validated over the whole data set.
We clustered the manually defined sets of activities in activity types
(cf. second column of the table 1) and identified three foci of bot
activities (cf. fifth column of the table 1): (1) the content focus, (2)
the task focus, and (3) the community focus.
The first category contains mainly bots that are active in the article
namespace. These bots are created primarily to support the curat-
ing activities of their operators (for example, by using Autowiki-
browser – a semi-automated MediaWiki editor13
) or to connect dif-
ferent language versions of a page through interwiki-links. The
second category comprises bots that are used to support the main-
tenance work of editors by compiling working lists or by informing
editors about existing status changes on articles. The third category
- the community focus - refers to activities that are rather unrelated
to encyclopedic articles; they are more related to community rules
and their enforcement.
Four bots have a community focus: the CopperBot, GiftBot, Items-
bot and xqbot. The CopperBot is the German equivalent to the
HagermanBot of the English Wikipedia [8] that is responsible for
signing unsigned comments on discussion pages. The main task of
the Itemsbot was welcoming new users to the German Wikipedia
by leaving a message on their personal discussion pages. Probably
because of the aforementioned community consensus against bot
welcome messages, the bot stopped working within two months.
In 2008 and 2009, the operator of the Giftbot requested a bot flag
for her bot in order to correct spelling mistakes. In both cases, the
request was denied. In July 2010, the third request was successful.
This time, the bot tasks included the removal of processed flagged
revision requests, the dissemination of a newsletter that contains
information on new edits on pages such as polls, and requests for
banning users as well. All these activities were much more fo-
cused on specific community needs. We assume that the operator
of Giftbot learned much more about existing rules and guidelines
over time and was therefore much better able to meet the needs of
her fellows.
The last of the four community bots is introduced in more detail in
the next section. We show in an exemplary way how the activity
set employed by this bot changes over time.
5.3.1 Example: xqbot
In October 2008, the editor applied for a bot flag for her xqbot in
order to request speedy deletions of orphan pages14
or remains of
moved pages. In November 2008, the bot flag was assigned and
the bot started working. Soon after this, the bot activities included
over ten different tasks such as correcting double redirects, fixing
links on disambiguation pages, adding missing references tags in
articles, and the setting of interwiki-links. All these tasks were
mainly focused on quality improvements to encyclopedic articles.
In 2010, the focus changed in terms of additional tasks. This was
motivated mainly by a procedural problem that occurred during an
administrator re-election.
In January 2010, one participant initiated a discussion by question-
ing the procedure to take care of obsolete votes [31], [32]. The
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowse
14
Orphan pages on Wikipedia are articles that have no or very few
incoming links.
Usability
Spiegelbild der
Geschlechterverhältnisse
Zugang
zum Internet
Offenheit

39. Quelle: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Objective_Revision_Evaluation_Service_logo.svg
»Objective
Revision
Evaluation
Service«

40. »Objective
Revision
Evaluation
Service«
Quelle: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:ORES_edit_quality_flow.svg

41. Wikipedia-
spezifisch
Gesamt-
gesellschaftlich
Geschlossenheit
Hackerkultur
Trolle
Spiegelbild der
Geschlechterverhältnisse
Usability
Mögliche Gründe
für Exklusion
in Wikipedia
Zugang
zum Internet
Offenheit
»Bots«
0
25
50
75
100
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012
editcountinpercentperyearineachusergroup
Anonymous users Bots
Registered users
Figure 3: Development of edits per user group (registered user,
anonymous user, bot) in the Wikipedia’s administrative names-
pace 4.
continuously increasing in number. Since bots have shown their
usefulness for a wide variety of tasks in the main namespace, their
scope has steadily expanded, and more edits have taken place in
other namespaces.
This contradicts a community guideline that suggests the avoidance
of editing activities of bots outside the article namespace. However,
in 2012, these “outside” edits accounted for over 40 percent of all
bot edits. This emergence of bot activity all over the community
project is an indication of the growing importance of these “lit-
tle helpers” for the community’s activities. This relates to a study
that analyzed the diversification of human edits over the different
namespaces. In 2001, about 90 percent of all edits were carried
out in the article namespace, but in 2006, this number had already
decreased to 70 percent [15]. We assume that the change in the
community engagement of bot operators also expanded the reach
of bot edits. More interestingly, while human edits slowed down in
Wikipedia’s community space, edits carried out by bots increased
as shown in Figure 3. In this administrative space, 20 different bots
have been active on average (disregarding wikilink-bots).
In the next part of our analysis, we specifically look at the types of
activities bots carry out. Our interest is twofold: first, we classify
tasks executed by bots in order to understand their relatedness to
existing social governance mechanisms. Second, we examine our
assumption of increasingly algorithmic rule enforcement by bots.
We collected task descriptions from bots’ user pages to examine
the kinds of activities in which bots are participating in the Wiki-
pedia community. In single, doubtful cases we matched edits with
their task descriptions to identify discrepancies and exclude those
activities. Based on these data, we defined general activity types
that are indicated in the first column of the table 1. These general
activity types were defined in three steps. During the first round,
we coded existing task descriptions collaboratively (around 100)
until we had an almost stable set of activities. In the second round,
we separately coded the remaining task descriptions. In the third
round, we checked the assigned codes and compared them with
our own decisions, and collaboratively coded all task descriptions
that needed new activity types. In order to create a shared under-
standing of existing activity types, the second and third rounds were
an iterative process. Newly introduced activity types were always
cross-validated over the whole data set.
We clustered the manually defined sets of activities in activity types
(cf. second column of the table 1) and identified three foci of bot
activities (cf. fifth column of the table 1): (1) the content focus, (2)
the task focus, and (3) the community focus.
The first category contains mainly bots that are active in the article
namespace. These bots are created primarily to support the curat-
ing activities of their operators (for example, by using Autowiki-
browser – a semi-automated MediaWiki editor13
) or to connect dif-
ferent language versions of a page through interwiki-links. The
second category comprises bots that are used to support the main-
tenance work of editors by compiling working lists or by informing
editors about existing status changes on articles. The third category
- the community focus - refers to activities that are rather unrelated
to encyclopedic articles; they are more related to community rules
and their enforcement.
Four bots have a community focus: the CopperBot, GiftBot, Items-
bot and xqbot. The CopperBot is the German equivalent to the
HagermanBot of the English Wikipedia [8] that is responsible for
signing unsigned comments on discussion pages. The main task of
the Itemsbot was welcoming new users to the German Wikipedia
by leaving a message on their personal discussion pages. Probably
because of the aforementioned community consensus against bot
welcome messages, the bot stopped working within two months.
In 2008 and 2009, the operator of the Giftbot requested a bot flag
for her bot in order to correct spelling mistakes. In both cases, the
request was denied. In July 2010, the third request was successful.
This time, the bot tasks included the removal of processed flagged
revision requests, the dissemination of a newsletter that contains
information on new edits on pages such as polls, and requests for
banning users as well. All these activities were much more fo-
cused on specific community needs. We assume that the operator
of Giftbot learned much more about existing rules and guidelines
over time and was therefore much better able to meet the needs of
her fellows.
The last of the four community bots is introduced in more detail in
the next section. We show in an exemplary way how the activity
set employed by this bot changes over time.
5.3.1 Example: xqbot
In October 2008, the editor applied for a bot flag for her xqbot in
order to request speedy deletions of orphan pages14
or remains of
moved pages. In November 2008, the bot flag was assigned and
the bot started working. Soon after this, the bot activities included
over ten different tasks such as correcting double redirects, fixing
links on disambiguation pages, adding missing references tags in
articles, and the setting of interwiki-links. All these tasks were
mainly focused on quality improvements to encyclopedic articles.
In 2010, the focus changed in terms of additional tasks. This was
motivated mainly by a procedural problem that occurred during an
administrator re-election.
In January 2010, one participant initiated a discussion by question-
ing the procedure to take care of obsolete votes [31], [32]. The
13
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:AutoWikiBrowse
14
Orphan pages on Wikipedia are articles that have no or very few
incoming links.
?

42. Von grenzenloser Offenheit zu legitimer Schließung:
Exklusion mit dem Ziel der Öffnung?

43. Bomis

44. Markenrechte
Serverinfrastruktur
Softwareentwicklung
Erstellung von Inhalten
Löschung von Inhalten
Arbeitsteilung Foundation/Community

45. Nutzungsrechte in
der deutschen
Wikipedia
keine
alle
keine

46. Markenrechte
Serverinfrastruktur
Softwareentwicklung
Erstellung von Inhalten
Löschung von Inhalten
Arbeitsteilung
Foundation/Community

47. Arbeitsteilung
Foundation/Community

48. Arbeitsteilung
Foundation/Community
Community-
ManagerInnen?

49. Offenheit als Organisationsprinzip führt
nicht automatisch zu mehr Diversität.
Grenzenlose Offenheit ist
nicht offen genug.

50. KONTAKT
E-Mail:
Leonhard.Dobusch@uibk.ac.at
Twitter:
@leonidobusch
Homepages:
bit.ly/LD-UIBK // www.dobusch.net
Forschungsblogs:
governancexborders.com // osconjunction.net