- Hendrik Jöntgen –
The focus in this research project of B.3 lies on the use of social capital in so-called “Digital Collectives”. A Digital Collective is a collective of social network users who temporarily work together and share their resources with each other in order to achieve a common goal. Examples for them are Firestorms and projects in Open Source Software Communities.
In order to investigate the effects of social capital on Firestorms we gather Tweets from past Firestorms to simulate and analyze the social network of their participants. As an enhancement for this study, we conduct a survey regarding the motivation to join a Firestorm. Based on this approach we can observe the effects of social capital on the development of firestorms.
A similar approach is taken for Open Source Software Communities. Based on crawled data of past Open Source projects we simulate and analyze the social network of their participants. Afterwards we investigate the social capital of the project leaders and developers and its effect on the willingness to join the project for outsiders.
Finally, we combine our insights about the use of social capital in these digital collective to get a better understanding about social capital and its benefits in social media networks.