This is a research seminar that will analyze the social and technical mechanisms that enable popular online collaboration systems systems like Wikipedia. Understanding how social processes and technical structures intersect to enable new kinds of interaction is a central question within information science. How does the design of an online collaboration system tap into basic social, psychological, and organizational processes? What are historical precedents of cooperative social systems and how can their lessons be translated to online systems? What kinds of behavioral data can researcher extract and analyze from these systems? How can the success or failure of these systems inform the design of alternative incentive and governance models? This course is part of the “Investigations in Information Science” series, which brings contemporary research to the classroom in the form of project-based investigation.