What do you think?: the structuring of an online community as a collective-sensemaking process

ABSTRACT

I observe conversations that take place as Wikipedia members negotiate, construct, and interpret its policies. Logs of these conversations offer a rare perhaps unparalleled opportunity to track how individuals, as they try to make sense, engage others in social interacts that become a collective processes of sensemaking. I draw upon Weick's model of sensemaking as committed-interpretation, which I ground in a qualitative inquiry into policy discussion pages, in attempt to explain how structuration emerges as interpretations are negotiated, and then committed through conversation, and as they are reified in the policy. I argue that the wiki environment provides conditions that help commitments form, strengthen and diffuse, and that this, in turn, helps explain trends of stabilization observed in previous research. The proposed model may prove useful for understanding structurational processes in other large wiki communities, and potentially in other radically open organizations.

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