THEMIS.COG: Theoretical and Empirical Modelling of Identities and Attitudes in Collaborative Groups

With "THEMIS.COG", a team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Tobias Schröder is investigating the social and psychological mechanisms of self-organised collaboration, with a focus on the open, collaborative software development platform GitHub. The aim is to obtain new, data-based insights into what motivates self-organised forms of collaboration – for example in small groups or at the level of social networks – and which conditions for success precede it. Specifically, a computer model of human interactions will be applied to provide explicit predictions about online interactions in a collaborative group, based on the assumption that identities are learnable, mathematically describable and complementary to other group members. The project will thus consolidate sociological theories and formally provide important social science answers about the characteristics of collaborations that go beyond the theoretical model of small groups at the network level.

The project team is interdisciplinary and international. In addition to the Potsdam sub-project, which focuses primarily on self-organised innovation processes, experts from the fields of sociology (USA) and computer science (Canada) are represented.

The Digging into Data Challenge funding programme, in which the project is funded, supports projects that apply large-scale digital data analysis techniques in the research field of social sciences and humanities.