Collaborating using digital technologies: The role of generative memory

Digital technologies are ushering in fundamental changes in the ways we work. One such change is the possibility of collaboration among actors who are not co-located. Indeed, digital technologies can serve as platforms for groups of actors from different time zones, cultures, and practice domains to engage with one another to accomplish complex tasks, even in the absence of a hierarchy. This chapter explores how digital technologies can facilitate asynchronous, distributed collaboration among actors by studying the emergence of articles on Wikipedia. It finds that the wiki digital technology automatically creates a multi-layered digital trace of who contributed what, the discussions that unfolded, and the emergent outcomes of collaboration over time. A central finding from this study is that this multi-layered digital trace in-use serves as a generative memory that shapes but does not determine the emergent outcomes of such collaboration.