Platform-Driven Collaboration Patterns: Structural Evolution Over Time and Scale

Within an increasingly digitalized organizational landscape, this research explores the dynamics of decentralized collaboration, contrasting it with traditional collaboration models. An effective capturing of high-level collaborations (beyond direct messages) is introduced as the network construction methodology including both temporal and content dimensions of user collaborations—an alternating timed interaction (ATI) metric as the first aspect, and a quantitative strategy of thematic similarity as the second aspect. This study validates three hypotheses that collectively underscore the complexities of digital team dynamics within sociotechnical systems. First, it establishes the significant influence of problem context on team structures in work environments. Second, the study reveals specific evolving patterns of team structures on digital platforms concerning team size and problem maturity. Last, it identifies substantial differences in team structure patterns between digital platforms and traditional organizational settings, underscoring the unexplored nature of digital collaboration dynamics. Focusing on Wikipedia's co-creation teams as a representative online platform, this study is instrumental for organizations navigating the digital era by identifying opportunities and challenges for managing information flow. The findings reveal significant collaborative potential and innovation in large online teams: the high speed of knowledge-sharing, numerous subcommunities, and highly decentralized leadership. This study paves the way for platform governors to design strategic interventions, tailored for different problem types, to optimize digital team dynamics and align them to broader organizational goals.