Hwang, Sohyeon

The largest and most studied peer-produced knowledge commons—projects like Wikipedia, free/libre open source software projects like GNU/Linux, and so on—are now decades old. As knowledge commons have grown and matured, they face a shifting range of new governance challenges related to protecting the valuable information goods they have created, such as increasing audience size and diversity, data use by and contributions from AI, coordinated cybersecurity attacks and misinformation campaigns, increased newcomer rejection, and dwindling engagement in governance activity, to name just a few. This panel aims to bring together researchers seeking to document these shifting challenges and how peer-production communities respond to them, while taking stock of the effectiveness of these responses. In particular, we hope to showcase research that takes advantage of the unique features of knowledge commons (such as the availability of detailed longitudinal data, or comparative data across populations of knowledge commons) to analyze these governance challenges across time, and between communities. The panel would be excited to present research revisiting empirical settings that served as sites of earlier work on knowledge commons to describe what has changed.