Motivated by the difficulty of effecting fundamental change in the architecture of the Internet, in this paper, we study from a theoretical perspective the question of how individuals can join forces toward collective ventures. To that end, we draw on an elementary concept in Internet systems engineering, namely, that of incremental deployability, which we study mathematically and computationally. For example, we show that incremental deployability is at least as general a concept as the Nash equilibrium (in that the latter can be derived from the former). We then draw on this foundation to design and analyze institutional mechanisms that are not only promising to bootstrap emerging Internet architectures but they also have broader applications in social organization beyond its predominant market (and finance)-based character.
Related to the problem of diffusing innovation is that of inciting collective action (in the sense that the decision to act in a particular fashion diffuses in a social system) a problem whose study was initiated in the seminal work of @cite_14 . The study of collective action was later taken up by several authors such as, for example, in the form of critical mass theories (bearing relevance to nuclear fission explosions in physics) . @cite_35 motivates the study of collective action in settings bearing a political nature related to citizen oppression in rogue states, however, models of collective action range from crowdsourcing in the Internet to enabling countermeasures against climate change (such as controlling carbon emissions). Although various authors discuss the problem of inciting collective action through incentives mechanisms, the idea of creating institutions to that effect (as we do in this paper) and proving their efficacy has not, to the extent of our knowledge, been considered before by these earlier works. (An exception is where the analysis is at an elementary stage.)
@cite_35 @cite_14
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Collective awareness about climate change is an ongoing problem because there is such a wealth of information available, which can be confusing, contradictory and difficult to interpret. In order to help citizens understand environmental concerns, and to help organisations better inform and target interested people with campaigns, we have developed an open source toolkit to analyse social media data on the topic of climate change. The toolkit comprises methods for extracting, aggregating, and visualising actionable knowledge, based on automatic analysis of large volumes of text. The key terms, topics and sentiments expressed in online discussions are extracted, along with key indicators of climate change, and are stored in a semantic search tool, which enables complex searches over the huge volumes of data. We describe a scenario using the toolkit to gain insights from a large collection of political tweets, showing how we can analyse this dataset for understanding engagement of the public with respect to the topic of climate change. By lowering the costs of communication, the web promises to enable distributed collectives to act around shared issues. However, many collective action efforts never succeed: while the web's affordances make it easy to gather, these same decentralizing characteristics impede any focus towards action. In this paper, we study challenges to collective action efforts through the lens of online labor by engaging with Amazon Mechanical Turk workers. Through a year of ethnographic fieldwork, we sought to understand online workers' unique barriers to collective action. We then created Dynamo, a platform to support the Mechanical Turk community in forming publics around issues and then mobilizing. We found that collective action publics tread a precariously narrow path between the twin perils of stalling and friction, balancing with each step between losing momentum and flaring into acrimony. However, specially structured labor to maintain efforts' forward motion can help such publics take action.