Benjamin Mako Hill

Faculty Associate

Privacy & Security Education, Libraries, & Digital Humanities Governance of Technology & the Internet Media, Democracy, & Public Discourse Technology & the Law
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Email
bhill@cyber.harvard.edu
Website
https://mako.cc/academic/
X (Twitter)
https://x.com/makoshark
Mastodon
https://social.coop/@mako

Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist, technologist, and activist. In all three roles, he works to understand why some attempts at peer production—like Wikipedia and Linux—build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science Collective. He has also been a leader, developer, and contributor to the free culture and free and open source software communities as part of the Debian, Ubuntu, Wikipedia, and Wikimedia projects.

Last updated

Community

arXiv

Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

"The promise of human behavioral simulation—general-purpose computational agents that replicate human behavior across domains—could enable broad applications in policymaking and…

Feb 17, 2025
arXiv

Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People

Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill, and coauthors propose a new agent behavior simulator that addresses the biases and errors of previous models.

Nov 15, 2024
University of Washington

Building better online communities

Researcher uses high-performance computing to understand how online communities work

Nov 13, 2019
Design Use Build

Why organizational culture matters for online groups

World of Warcraft and the study of online communities

Oct 22, 2018
Design Use Build

What we lose when we move from social to market exchange

The shift away from social exchange and toward markets, and what this means for the sharing economy

Oct 9, 2018

Events

Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About Mechanisms of Collective Action
Event
Oct 11, 2011 @ 12:30 PM

Almost Wikipedia: What Eight Collaborative Encyclopedia Projects Reveal About Mechanisms of Collective Action

Benjamin Mako Hill, Berkman Center & MIT

Benjamin Mako Hill will present some preliminary findings from a qualitative, inductive, case-study based analysis of 8 early projects to create online collaborative encyclopedias.

“Revealing Errors” / “Why the Soviet Internet Failed” / “Global Voices, One World"
Oct 21, 2008 @ 6:00 PM

“Revealing Errors” / “Why the Soviet Internet Failed” / “Global Voices, One World"

The "Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group" is a forum for fellows and affiliates of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, Yale Law School Information Society…