Wikipedia, which will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2026, has been able to create encyclopedias in more than 50 languages. Free and open source software organizations, which began challenging the software industry in the 1990s, are now considered a core element of the business.

The challenge of the DATA2LAWS project is to propose a theory of scaling of such large online collectives. We will look for invariants, if any, in the constitution and consolidation of sustainable, massive projects, and identify the conditions that allow them to scale. Our aim is not to oversimplify the sociological mechanisms involved, but rather to understand the common mechanisms while highlighting the different variants.

The main scientific challenges are 1) to determine whether all these large collectives follow the same 3-phase evolutionary dynamics (growth, percolation, cruising), 2) whether they share common properties at the level of contributors, in their motivations and trajectories through the phases, in the way they form collective actions and according to which organizations, 3) to refine the diversity of behaviors and collective dynamics, and 4) to extract middle-range theories of scaling.

To achieve this, we will combine several complementary disciplines: data mining, signal processing, statistical physics, social simulation, sociology, and management, which is a challenge in itself. By adopting a complex network approach that brings us together, we will confront different viewpoints and methods to capture the multiple facets of the scaling phenomenon.

We expect our project to improve decision making for the management of large collectives.

Our non-funded partners (Wikimedia France, OW2, The Eclipse Foundation) are interested in improving their “community building” and more generally their governance. Our results could lead to different tools adapted to the different phases, to detect when a collective doesn’t meet the conditions for scaling up, or predict if scaling up could appear with the introduction of certain organizational rules.

DATA2LAWS brings an ambitious new scientific challenge to PEPR eNSEMBLE, meeting the PC4 CONGRATS objective of theorizing online community collaboration.