Academic Work By Type

• Curriculum Vitae
• Working Papers
• Peer-Reviewed Publications
• Other Scholarly Publications
• Workshops and Research Paper Presentations
• Lectures and Classes
• Other Academic Work

Academic Work

I am currently a PhD student at MIT in an interdepartmental social science program and work full time doing research on the interaction between social structure and technology in free culture and free software communities. I think of my work as primarily quantitative sociology.

This page contains links to my academic writing and presentations. Most of what I've written (including several and a large number of essays) is not academic. If you want to read my non-scholarly work, please see my writing page. There are also a set of non-refereed "semi-academic" articles hosted on that page. If you'd like to see links to my non-academic talks and presentations, please see my my talk page.

You may also want to read my curriculum vitae. Thanks to Kieran Healy whose CV provided me with typographic inspiration.

Working Papers

Please do not cite or quote these papers without my premission. Contact me for copies of any papers that are listed here but are not linked directly from this page here.

• Hill, Benjamin Mako, Aaron Shaw and Yochai Benkler. Status, Social Signalling and Collective Action in a Peer Production Community.
• Hill, Benjamin Mako. Almost Wikipedia: What eight early online collaborative encyclopedia projects reveal about the mechanisms of collective action. [Abstract & Video)
• Hill, Benjamin Mako. Causal Effects of a Reputation-Based Incentive in an Peer Production Community.

Refereed Articles

• Monroy-Hernández, Andrés, Benjamin Mako Hill, Jasmine González-Rivero, danah boyd. (2011). "Computers can't give credit: How automatic attribution falls short in an online remixing community" in Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). (Awards: CHI '11 Honorable mention). [HTML, PDF]
• Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2010). "Revealing Errors" in Error: Glitch, Noise, and Jam in New Media Cultures edited by Mark Nunes. Continuum. (An expanded version of the 2007 journal article.)
• Buechley, Leah, Benjamin Mako Hill. (2010). "LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardwareʼs Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities" Proceedings of the Conference on Design of Interactive Systems. Aarhus, Denmark. [PDF]
• Hill, Benjamin Mako Hill, Andrés Monroy Hernández, and Kristina Olson. 2010. “Responses to remixing on a social media sharing website.” Pp. 74-81 in Proceedings of the 4th AAAI Conference on Weblogs and Social Media. Washington, D.C.: AAAI. PDF]
• Hill, Benjamin Mako. 2007. “Revealing Errors.” Media/Culture Journal 10 (Feature Article). [web link]
• Coleman, Gabriella, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2004. “How free became open and everything else under the sun.” Media/Culture Journal 7 (Feature Article). [web link]
• Coleman, Gabriella, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2004. “The Social Production of Ethics in Debian and Free Software Communities: Anthropological Lessons for Vocational Ethics.” in Free/Open Source Software Development, edited by Stefan Koch. [Page Scans, Book Info]
• Michlmayr, Martin, and Benjamin Mako Hill. 2003. “Quality and the reliance on individuals in free software projects.” Pp. 105–109 in Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Open Source Software Engineering. [PDF]

Other Scholarly Publications

• [Book Chapter]. Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2011). "Freedom for Users, Not For Software. In Commons. Für eine neue Politik jenseits von Markt und Staat, edited by Silke Helfrich, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. (English Version Forthcoming)
• [Interactive Poster]. Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Benjamin Mako Hill. Cooperation and Attribution in an Online Community of Young Creators. Computer Supported Coopreative Work (CSCW '10) [Abstract PDF]
• [Book review] Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2008). "Samir Chopra, Scott D. Dexter, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software." Minds and Machines 18:297-299. [PDF]
• [S.M. Thesis] Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2007). “Cooperation in Parallel: A Tool for Supporting Collaborative Writing in Diverged Documents.” Masters Thesis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Media Arts and Sciences. Advised by Walter Bender, Chris Csikszentmihályi, and Gabriella Coleman. [PDF]
• [Review] Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2005). “Reflections on free software past and future.” First Monday 10. [web link]
• [B.A. Thesis] Hill, Benjamin Mako. (2003). “Literary Collaboration and Control A Socio-Historic, Technological and Legal Analysis.” Undergraduate Thesis, Hampshire College. Advised by James Miller, James Wald, and David Bollier. [web link]

Workshops and Paper Presentations

This section only includes information on my academic presentations. I give many presentations to non-academic audiences. These are listed on my talks page.

• [Working Paper Presentation] Almost Wikipedia: What eight early online collaborative encyclopedia projects reveal about the mechanisms of collective action. Wikimedia Foundation, San Francisco, California. 2011-11-02.
• [Working Paper Presentation] Status, Social Signalling and Collective Action in a Peer Production Community. With Aaron Shaw. Laboratory for Social Research Seminar, University of California Berkeley. October 28, 2011.
• [Working Paper Presentation] Almost Wikipedia: What eight early online collaborative encyclopedia projects reveal about the mechanisms of collective action. Luncheon Series, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. October 11, 2011. ["Abstract & Presentation Video)
• [Research Stream Overview] Using Social Awards To Build Better Free Software & Free Culture Projects With Aaron Shaw. Fórum Internacional Software Livre, Porto Alegre, Brasil. July 1, 2011.
• [Working Paper Presentation] "What the community is remixing:" The effect of a new status-based incentive to collaborate in an online collaborative community. MIT Open and User Innovation Workshop. Cambridge, MA. August 2, 2010.
• [Refereed Panel (Co-organizer)] Reviewing and challenging socio-political approaches in the analysis of open collaboration and collective action online. With Mayo Fuster Morell. WikiSym 2010. Gdansk, Poland. July 10, 2010. [PDF]
• [Seminar Presentation] "What the community is remixing:" The effect of a new status-based incentive to collaborate in an online collaborative community. MIT Economic Sociology Working Group, Cambridge, MA. June 9, 2010.
• [Seminar Presentation] Two empirical analyses of cooperation in Scratch. With Andrés Monroy Hernández. Harvard Cooperation Group, Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Cambridge, MA. April 26, 2010.

Lectures and Classes

I have helped teach the following classes as a teaching assistant where I, over the several years I have tought the class, have also delivered a number of the course lectures:

• [Teaching Assistant] 15.356: How to Develop "Breakthrough" Products and Services. (Prof. Eric von Hippel). MIT Program in Systems Design and Management. Spring, 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012.
• [Teaching Assistant] 15.969: User-Centric Innovations. (Prof. Eric von Hippel). MIT Sloan School of Management. Spring, 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012.
• MAS.960: Graduate Reading Seminar in Free Software and Open Source. MIT Media Lab, Fall 2008.
• 15.960: Special Seminar in Collective Intelligence. Sloan School of Management, Fall 2008.

I have also given the following guest lectures:

• [Guest Lecture] Failure in Free Software and Civic Media. Civic Media, Comparative Media Studies, MIT. November 28, 2011.
• [Guest Lecture] Free Software and Free Culture. Difficult Problems in Cyberlaw, Stanford School of Design and Stanford Law School. October, 31, 2011.
• [Guest Lecture] Hackers: What they do, and why they do it. Visiting MBA Class from Vienna University. (Dr. Philipp Türtscher). September 12, 2011.
• [Guest Lecture] Hackers: What they do, and why they do it. Visiting MBA Class from Vienna University. (Dr. Philipp Türtscher). May 4, 2010.
• [Guest Lecture] Hackers: What they do, and why they do it. MIT Sloan School of Management. 15.356: How to Develop "Breakthrough" Products and Services. (Prof. Eric von Hippel). February 16, 2010. [ODP Slides, PDF Slides, HTML Notes, ReST Notes]
• [Guest Lecture] Hackers: What they do, and why they do it. MIT Program in Systems Design and Management. 15.969: User-Centered Innovations. (Prof. Eric von Hippel). February 12, 2010.
• [Guest Lecture] Hackers: What they do, and why they do it. MIT Program in Systems Design and Management. 15.969: User-Centered Innovations (Prof. Eric von Hippel). February 20, 2009.
• [Guest Lecture] Hackers: What they do, and why they do it. MIT Sloan School of Management. 15.356: How to Develop "Breakthrough" Products and Services. (Prof. Eric von Hippel). February 17, 2009.

Other Academic Activities

• Interdepartmental Degree Proposal (PDF): At MIT, I'm enrolled in an interdepartmental PhD program that involves faculty from both the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab. The proposal lists the faculty and requirements of my program and lays out the justification, very broadly, of what my degree is about. I wrote this proposal with members of the MIT faculty and had it approved by both departments and the Dean of Graduate Students. The program is overseen by Professors Eric von Hippel, Tom Malone, and Mitch Resnick.
• General Exams: As part of my PhD program, I had to organize and take a series of examinations that tested my knowledged in three academic areas: (1) technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and strategy with an added emphasis on the study of open and user innovation, (2) organizational and economic sociology and (3) technology design for cooperation, community, and creativity. I created a page for these that includes the proposal, reading list, link to notes, and links to the exam questions and my answers. The generals committee included Eric von Hippel, Jason Davis, and Mitch Resnick
• 8th Annual Open and User Innovation Conference: I coordinated the program, and acted as master of ceremonies for (!), the 8th Annual Open and User Innovation conference held at MIT Sloan School of Management on August 2-4, 2010. The conference had 183 talks and 7 parallel tracks from researchers from North America, Asia, and Europe. Eric von Hippel, Erin Carlson, and Karim Lakhani assisted as well.
• AcaWiki: AcaWiki is a wiki that hosts summaries of academic articles and books. I have written several hundred summaries of scholarly articles and books which I've shared on the site. When time permits, I try to continue summaries of articles that I read in my course of my research.