Given enough eyeballs, all crimes are shallow – The organizing of citizen collaboration to solve an online detective story

Abstract

This paper theorizes about the organizing of online citizen collaboration. The setting is an Internet forum where people started their own investigations about a crime of animal cruelty. The concepts of commons-based peer production and generativity are utilized to analyse the complex organizing mechanisms of voluntaristic online collaboration in practice. Three general functions are introduced - operational, managerial, and noise - which are intertwined and together make up important basis for organizing generativity.