Benjamin Mako Hill is an Assistant Professor in the University of Washington Department of Communication His research focuses on collective action in online communities and seeks to understand why some attempts at collaborative production—like Wikipedia and Linux—build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. He is particularly interested in how the design of communication and information technologies shape fundamental social outcomes with broad theoretical and practical implications—like the decision to join a community or contribute to a public good. His research is deeply interdisciplinary, consists primarily of “big data” quantitative analyses, and lies at the intersection of communication, human-computer interaction, and sociology.