Aaron Shaw

I am a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and a Research Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Beginning Fall, 2013, I will be an Assistant Professor at Northwestern.

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.

I completed my Ph.D in Sociology at the 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.