Open Collaboration Data Factories

Supporting data sharing and data discovery for research on open online communities.

The Open Collaboration Data Factories (OCDF) initiative focuses on actively prototyping open knowledge infrastructures as solutions to gaps in research approaches and methods in the study of knowledge creation in open online communities, such as those that create Wikipedia, open source software, and citizen science. We are building a community of scholars who address differences in research aims, data, and methods to enable a new, interdisciplinary knowledge production.

The Open Knowledge Lab has leveraged  student course assignments to develop a prototype research data directory with detailed documentation of openly available data for the study of online communities. Information Management graduate students in Dr. Wiggins’ INFM 600 (Information Environments) course learn valuable professional skills by searching, evaluating, interrogating, documenting, licensing, and citing open data while creating value-added resources for scientific research on open collaboration.