Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist and technologist. In both roles, he works to understand the social dynamics that shape online communities. His work focuses on communities engaged in the peer production of digital public goods—like Wikipedia and Linux.
He is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and a founding member of the Community Data Science Collective. He is also an Adjunct Associate Professor in UW's Department of Human-Centered Design & Engineering, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, and Information School. He is also a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science—both at Harvard University. He has also been an activist, developer, contributor, and leader in the free and open source software and free culture movements for more than two decades as part of the Debian, Ubuntu, and Wikimedia projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books and has served terms as a member of the the Free Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab and a PhD from MIT in an interdepartmental program between the Sloan School of Management and the Media Lab.
