Aleksi Aaltonen

Open content production platforms typically allow users to gradually create content and react to previous contributions. Using detailed edit-level data across a large number of Wikipedia articles, we investigate how past edits shape current editing activity. We find that cumulative past contributions, embodied by the current article length, lead to significantly more editing activity, while controlling for a host of factors such as popularity of the topic and platform-level growth trends. The magnitude of the effect is large; content growth over an eight-year period would have been 45% lower in its absence. Our findings suggest that other open content production environments are likely to also benefit from similar cumulative growth effects. In the presence of such effects, managerial interventions that increase content are amplified because they trigger further contributions.

Digital artifacts are embedded in wider and constantly shifting ecosystems such that they become increasingly editable, interactive, reprogrammable, and distributable. This state of flux and constant transfiguration renders the value and utility of these artifacts contingent on shifting webs of functional relations with other artifacts across specific contexts and organizations. By the same token, it apportions control over the development and use of these artifacts over a range of dispersed stakeholders and makes their management a complex technical and social undertaking. These ideas are illustrated with reference to (1) provenance and authenticity of digital documents within the overall context of archiving and social memory and (2) the content dynamics occasioned by the findability of content mediated by Internet search engines. We conclude that the steady change and transfiguration of digital artifacts signal a shift of epochal dimensions that calls for rethinking some of the inherited wisdom in IS research and practice.

Digital objects are marked by a limited set of variable yet generic attributes such as editability, interactivity, openness and distributedness. As digital objects diffuse throughout the institutional fabric, these attributes and the information–based operations and procedures out of which they are sustained install themselves at the heart of social practice. The entities and processes that constitute the stuff of social practice are thereby rendered increasingly unstable and transfigurable, producing a context of experience in which the certainties of recurring and recognizable objects are on the wane. These claims are supported with reference to 1) the elusive identity of digital documents and the problems of authentication/preservation of records such an identity posits and 2) the operations of search engines and the effects digital search has on the content of the documents it retrieves.

Artikkelini tarkastelee erilaisten teemojen, tapahtumien ja tavoitteiden kietou- tumista yhteen Ilmatieteen laitoksen ja Merentutkimuslaitoksen yhteiseksi toimitalohankkeeksi Helsingin yliopiston Kumpulan kampuksella. Toimija- verkkoteoriaan perustuva tutkimusotteeni käyttää apunaan toiminnan kohteen käsitettä useisiin eri organisaatioihin hajautuneen verkoston rajaamisessa.

Empirical research proceeds often through numerous iterations, involving lots of source documents, datasets and other files. Unless you are prepared to do quite a bit of digital housekeeping, burgeoning materials can easily spin out of control, turning research from an intellectual adventure into an administrative nightmare. In this post, I describe a simple system for taking care of raw data, datasets and, finally, for archiving analyses.

As an academic, I regularly receive proposals for a PhD study. This is great and I am happy to review applications from smart people who are interested in working with me. Unfortunately, many proposals end up binned because they fail on the following simple criteria.

BT is planning to swallow mobile phone provider EE for £12.5 billion, a deal that will bring together Britain’s largest fixed-line telco and broadband provider with the country’s largest mobile phone network. While that looks ominous, it’s been suggested there’s still enough competition in the industry for Ofcom not to intervene.

Google launched its Android One initiative this summer, with the aim of bringing smartphones, apps and the whole mobile internet to the five billion people around the world who do not yet have access to a smartphone. The program targets worlds’ most populous areas, especially in Asia, and the first devices have just recently been announced in India.

How do you recognize a technological innovation? It feels like magic. The wonder happens when an app or a gadget does something that you don't expect from technology. It can be calling a cab with a push of a button, watching a movie of your choice on the go, or playing a game with gestures in the air. The magic wears off as we change habits to incorporate the new technology into our routines. The most successful innovations fade completely into the background as they become an indispensable part of our daily lives. They become like electricity, something that we notice only when it is broken.

How does a new medium create its audience? This study takes the business model of commercial media as its starting point and identifies industrial audience measurement as a constitutive operation in creating the sellable asset of advertising- funded companies. The study employs a qualitative case study design to analyse how a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) company harnesses digital behavioural records generated by computational network infrastructure to turn network subscribers into an advertising audience product. The empirical evidence is based on a three-months intensive fieldwork at the company office.

The analysis reveals comprehensiveness, openness and granularity as the historically new attributes of computational data vis-à-vis traditional audience measurement arrangements. These attributes are then juxtaposed with four kinds of business analytical operations (automatic data aggregation procedures, the use of software reporting tools, organizational reporting practices and custom analyses) observed at the research site to assess how does computational media environment rule key audiencemaking practices. Finally, the implications of this analytical infrastructure are reflected upon three sets of organizational practices. The theoretical framework for the analysis is composed by critically assessing constructivist approaches (SCOT, ANT and sociomateriality) for studying technology and by discussing an approach inspired by critical realism to overcome their limitations with respect to the objectives of the study.

The findings contribute toward innovating new digital services, information systems (IS) theory and the study of media audiences. The case opens up considerable complexity involved in establishing a new kind of advertising audience and, more generally, a platform business. Sending out advertisements is easy compared to demonstrating that somebody is actually receiving them. The three computational attributes both extend and provide summative validity for mid-range theorizing on how computational objects mediate organizational practices and processes. Finally, the analysis reveals an interactive nature of digital audience stemming from the direct and immediate behavioural feedback in an audiencemaking cycle.

It is easy to imagine a society without mobile phones or genetically modified food, but what about one without roads, buildings and bridges? It is impossible to conceive of a modern society devoid of the basic material infrastructure. Contrary to the rapid evolution of high technology appliances, the built environment tends to be relatively persistent. Hardly any other artifact is produced for a longer life cycle than a building or a bridge. Natural decay and social change put, however, the built environment under constant transformative pressure. A new piece of physical infrastructure often steers its users behaviour inconspicuously for decades.

The paper draws from research in top academic journals to identify factors that are relevant for high-technology entrepreneurship both at the regional and firm levels. Most of the studies in the review use data from the late 1990s and early 2000s. The studies touch upon various aspects of entrepreneurship, and help identify numerous factors and mechanisms that have been found to play an important role in technology entrepreneurship in general.

Many organisations are developing open platforms to create, store and share knowledge. Aleksi Aaltonen and Stephan Seiler analyse editing data by Wikipedia users to show how content creation by individuals generates significant ‘spillover’ benefits, encouraging others to contribute to the collective process of knowledge production.

Intuition and gut feelings are out of fashion – successful business leaders measure and base their decisions on how things really are. Evangelised by companies such as Google, metrics-driven decisions are becoming increasingly common in all kinds of organizations today. Dualistic – either metrics or intuition – thinking largely reflects academic antagonisms between qualitative and quantitative methods that our education system keeps imprinting into the minds of future leaders. It is quite human to like the comfort of knowing the One Right Way, but for an organization such narrow-mindedness can be a disaster. Metrics and intuition are not mutually exclusive, opposing ways to make decisions. The current wisdom would seem to emphasize metrics that, nonetheless, always presuppose intuition.