Benjamin Mako Hill

Benjamin Mako Hill is an Associate Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication and an Adjunct Associate Professor in Human-Centered Design & Engineering, the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and the Information School at UW. He is a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University and a Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University during the 2023–2024 academic year.

Educational Background:

• PhD in an interdepartmental program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), involving the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab, advised by Eric von Hippel, Yochai Benkler, Tom Malone, and Mitch Resnick.
• MS in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT.
• B.A. in Technological and Legal History from Hampshire College.

Research Interests span peer production, online communities, collective action, cooperation, learning, and computer-mediated communication. His work explores how communication and information technologies shape social outcomes in collaborative environments like Wikipedia and Linux, focusing on governance, moderation, anonymity, and educational platforms such as Scratch.

Article Trends: His publications analyze peer production dynamics, privacy in open collaboration, and computational thinking in youth. Topics include underproduction in open source software, algorithmic fairness, taboo knowledge production, and legitimate peripheral participation in online communities. Methodologies combine big data, quasi-experimental, and comparative analyses.

Scientific Awards:

• Dordick Award for Best Dissertation (2013).
• CHI '22 Best Paper Honorable Mention (2022).
• CSCW '18 Best Paper Honorable Mention (2018).
• CHI '17 Best Paper Honorable Mention (2017).
• CSCW '13 Best Paper Award (2013).
• CHI '11 Best Paper Honorable Mention (2011).

Advising and Grants: He co-founded the Community Data Science Collective and collaborates with researchers like Aaron Shaw. Grants include multiple National Science Foundation awards for studies on digital knowledge commons, anonymous participation, and collaborative success, as well as a Sloan Foundation grant for modeling underproduction in peer production.

Labs and Teams: He leads the Community Data Science Collective, an interdisciplinary research group studying online communities, and contributes to open-source projects like Debian and Ubuntu. He actively edits Wikimedia projects and participates in the Cascadia Wikimedians User Group.