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The Community Data Science Collective (CDSC) is an interdisciplinary research group made up of faculty and students at the University of Washington Department of Communication, the Northwestern University Department of Communication Studies, the School of Information at UT Austin, the Brian Lamb School of Communication at Purdue University, and the University of Idaho Department of Psychology and Communication.
We are social scientists applying a range of quantitative and qualitative methods to the study of online communities. We seek to understand both how and why some attempts at collaborative production — like Wikipedia and Linux — build large volunteer communities and high-quality work products.
Our research is particularly focused on how the design of communication and information technologies shapes fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications — like an individual’s decision to join a community, contribute to a public good, or a group’s ability to make decisions democratically.
Our research is deeply interdisciplinary. It most frequently consists of “big data” quantitative analyses, but also includes qualitative analyses such as interview studies. Our work lies at the intersection of communication, sociology, human-computer interaction, and information science.
To learn more about the CDSC, please check out our about page (especially the links there). Prospective students should also review these materials.
Outreach
Our group is committed to public scholarship. We express this commitment through a series of events and publications directed at practitioner audiences and focused on translating our publications for nonacademic audiences.
- Community Data Science Blog — A blog that we update regularly with summaries of our papers, reflections on research and online communities, and whatever else is on our minds!
- Science of Community Dialogues — A series of events that bring together community leaders, organizers, and researchers to share evidence-based strategies for thriving communities.
- Research briefs — Short, accessible summaries of our research written for community leaders, practitioners, and policy makers.
Courses
In addition to research, we teach classes and run workshops. Some of that work is coordinated on this wiki. A more detailed list of workshops and teaching material on this wiki is on our Workshops and Classes page. On this page, we only list ongoing classes and workshops with their own wiki pages or syllabi.
University of Washington | Seattle Courses
- [Spring 2026] COM 597 B / CSSS 594 A: Text as Data — A MA/PhD seminar taught jointly with the Center for Statistics and the Social Sciences by Benjamin Mako Hill covering computational methods for analyzing text.
University of Washington | Bothell Courses
- [Spring 2026] CSS 490: Open Source Studio — Equips students to make a meaningful contribution to a software development project using open source software as a case study.
Research Resources
If you are a member of the collective, perhaps you're looking for CommunityData:Resources, which includes details on email, TeX templates, documentation on our computing resources, etc.
About This Wiki
This is open to the public and hackable by all but mostly contains information that will be useful to collective members, their collaborators, people enrolled in their projects, or people interested in building off of their work. If you're interested in making a change or creating content here, generally feel empowered to Be Bold. If things don't fit, somebody who watches this wiki will be in touch.
This is mostly a normal MediaWiki although there are a few things to know:
- There's a CAPTCHA enabled. If you create an account and then contact any collective member with your username (on or off wiki), they can turn the CAPTCHA off for you.
- Extension:Math is installed so you can write math here. Basically you just add math by putting TeX inside <math> tags like this: <math>\frac{\sigma}{\sqrt{n}}</math> and it will write $ {\frac {\sigma }{\sqrt {n}}} $.
Follow Us!
Follow us on Bluesky as @communitydata.science, @communitydata@social.coop in the Fediverse/Mastodon, or @comdatasci on X/Twitter.
Best of all, subscribe to the Community Data Science Collective blog to get email updates!
Research News
Recent posts from the blog:
- Seeking to Interview People Who Make Software!
- Students in the CDSC are recruiting for two interview studies. The AI Slop study seeks to interview people involved in open source software who have experience dealing with AI-authored contributions. We hope to learn more about how communities are responding to this challenge, with a particular focus on ‘AI Slop’. You can read more about …
Continue reading "Seeking to Interview People Who Make Software!"
- — kaylea 2026-07-10
- Impacts of AI on Software Engineering Processes
- How does software engineering change when AI is part of the product we're creating? Current practice suggests a need for structured experimentation, tolerance for uncertainty, deep qualitative research and evaluation, wrangling with questions of meaning and knowledge, advanced statistics and mathematics, and more. How might we expand our efforts to build these skills? CDSC faculty …
Continue reading "Impacts of AI on Software Engineering Processes"
- — kaylea 2026-07-01
- FOSSY 2026: Call for Proposals!
- The Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference (FOSSY) is back for the fourth year in a row, and we’ll be running the Science of Community track, inspired by the CDSC Science of Community Dialogues, bringing together practitioners and researchers to talk about scholarly work that’s relevant to the efforts of practitioners. Does your work …
- — madisondeyo 2026-05-20
- Political discussion in non-political online communities is more likely to see policy opinion expression
- It seems natural to think that online political discussion happens in political spaces: comment sections under news articles, campaign pages, partisan forums, or video-sharing communities built around elections and public affairs. But anyone who spends time online knows that politics does not stay neatly contained in those spaces. It shows up in local forums, hobby …
- — Yibin Fan 2026-05-28
- Performing the News: Rhetoric, Trust, and the Fight Against Video Disinformation in India
- Apart from being generally chronically online on political X/Bluesky/Tiktok/Instagram, I also study science disinformation for a living, which means I spend a lot of time reading things that aren’t true. More specifically, I spend time reading the corrections, the careful, methodical, often thankless articles that community media organizations publish after a manipulated video has already …
- — srishchatters 2026-05-07
