A climate of trust: perceptions of legitimate authority in a volunteer computing project

Conference item

Volunteer computing projects are computationally-intensive scientific research projects which seek to meet their need for data processing capacity by asking members of the public to download and process project data on their personal computers. This paper presents findings from a study of the interactions in an online forum of participants in such a project, climateprediction.net. It focuses upon the beliefs of one group of participants, who have been identified as particularly critical to the success of volunteer computing projects, about the organizational policies of climateprediction.net and what are appropriate and inappropriate ways for other participants to behave in the forums.

Authors: Darch, P; Carusi, A; Jirotka, M

• Publication status: Not published
• Peer review status: Not peer reviewed
• Language: English
• Keywords: peer-to-peer networks; trust; volunteer computing projects; legitimate authority