The open community data exchange: Advancing data sharing and discovery in open online community science

While online behavior creates an enormous amount of digital data that can be the basis for social science research, to date, the science has been conducted piecemeal, one internet address at a time, often without social or scholarly impact beyond the site's own stakeholders. Scientists lack the tools, methods, and practices to combine, compare, contrast and communicate about online behavior across internet addresses or over time. In response, we are building the infrastructure for computational social scientists, social scientists, and citizens to make corresponding advances in our understanding of online human interactions. In this paper, we present our effort to specify the Open Community Data Exchange (OCDX) metadata standard to describe datasets, as well as the necessary infrastructure for creating, editing, viewing, sharing, and analyzing manifests. The purpose of this paper is to communicate the current state of our project and represent our current findings through our ongoing engagement with the scientific community and to engage in dialog among computational social scientists.