Aaron Shaw

I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. At Northwestern, I am also affiliated with the Sociology Department, the Institute for Policy Research, and the Buffett Center.

I study collective action, collaboration, and mobilization online. My current projects address the the organizational factors that determine whether peer production communities (like Wikipedia) succeed or fail; mobilization and engagement in online systems; and the dynamics of participation in commercial crowdsourcing markets and non-commercial peer production projects.

My research has been generously supported by FUSE Labs at Microsoft Research, the Ford Foundation, the Ewing and Marion Kaufman Foundation, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the University of California Office of the President, and the United States Department of Education.

I completed my Ph.D in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Some of my previous research has compared the participatory infrastructures of the right and left of the U.S. political blogosphere; investigated the origins of Free Software policies in Brazil; and analyzed applications of crowdsourcing for both social scientific research and humanitarian crisis relief.

If you'd like to read more, here's my CV and links to papers are on my research page. For more information, copies of papers, or just to say hello, please send me an email. If you're on the Northwestern campus and you're trying to find me, my office is room 2-142 in the Frances Searle Building.