READ THE PASSAGE AND ANSWER THE QUESTIONS THAT FOLLOW.
Without a formal hierarchy, how do members
of online communities work together to
create vast founts of knowledge such
as Wikipedia? A recent study examines
how leadership can emerge in online
communities. It seems to indicate that
for companies who wish to leverage the
influence of online community leaders,
identifying those leaders will be more
complex than expected.
Who are online leaders? It turns out that
online leaders or those considered to
influence the way the internet seems to
weight certain ideas above others is centrally
down to a group of trendsetters who, in
general, are people who are related in some
way or other to a topic i.e. fashion leaders
on facebook that everyone follows or foody
people who push restaurants and new food
trends. They are essentially people like you
and I; an exciting prospect and an interesting
one considering how they are created.
How do online communities, whose
members are scattered across the globe,
work so successfully without formal control
structures? While traditional organisations
rely on control mechanisms, online
communities are loosely coordinated, selforganising,
and voluntary. Some observers
have labelled online communities "leaderless
organisations". When researchers started, it
was unclear whether leadership existed at all
in online communities. While other studies
subsequently uncovered some insights,
such as how individuals move from the
outskirts to the centre, in the most recent
study researchers developed an integrated
framework to study leadership in online
communities. Traditional leadership theory
says that leaders assign tasks and manage
relationships, while other research shows
that influential members occupy central
positions in the organisational structure. The
researchers in this case set out to discover
whether similar ideas also apply to online
communities. To gather data, they surveyed
users and studied messages from three
online communities focused on technical
topics related to programming, examining
both the behaviours and structural position
within the networks of those identified by
other participants as leaders.
The researchers' findings indicate that
leaders are mainly distinguished by their
task-based behaviours. They contribute
knowledge by answering queries, sometimes
sharing programming code, and giving
personal assessments. Tenure (duration
of membership) and participation were
positively associated with being identified as
a leader, but the number of questions asked
by a participant had a negative association,
which indicates that a leader is more
likely to provide answers than questions.
The researchers also rated postings for
the existence and frequency of sign-offs,
thanks, and personal anecdotes — signs
of sociability within online communities
— and found that sociability was less
significant than knowledge contribution.
However, it can't be concluded that
sociability is unimportant in all online
communities, just that it is not as important
as technical knowledge contribution in
the communities studied, which are all
dedicated to sharing technical expertise. In
technical forums, such as those dedicated
to programming, there are, often, correct
and incorrect answers to questions; on the
other hand, in online communities organised
around social support or political action,
relationships and sociable behaviour of
influential members may be valued more.
These more subjective sites may well have
a different set of rules governing choice for
those inclined to follow trend setters.
The researchers complemented their
approach with a structural approach,
using the concept of social capital, or
resources accessed by virtue of relational
ties. In traditional organisations, members
in top positions can get information from
unconnected groups and trade off on it.
For example, doing someone a favour and
expecting it to be returned. The researchers
wondered whether a similar edge could
be gained online. After all, in the context
of knowledge collaboration, information
is key, and an individual who "bridges"
unconnected parts of the network benefits
from arbitrage opportunities. By making
ties between who responded to whom in
the online community, the researchers did
indeed find that structural social capital
was strongly associated with leadership.
Although there is no way to know what
came first, the leader's position or the social
capital. They also found that leadership is a
lot more concentrated than expected: out of
nearly 1,000 participants in the study, only
42 were identified as leaders, while fewer
still, were nominated 9 or more times!
To an observer there seems to be as many
uncertainties as there are answers in this
very complex system of cyber leadership
and although it may seem that, in actuality,
very few people have a lot of control over
web content the speed at which leaders
are replaced is a clear area of study worth
considering because anecdotally the rapid
replacements of leaders help bring the
diversity and freedom the internet seems
to provide. So, we may not have more
leaders in the future but instead more
people embarking upon and ending their
leadership roles.
What is the greatest internet resource?
A Developing computers
B Shared knowledge
C Customer service
D Structural organisation
I think the correct answer should be (d)
