TY - GEN
T1 - A tale of two online communities
T2 - 7th ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition, C and C 2009
AU - Aragon, Cecilia R.
AU - Poon, Sarah S.
AU - Monroy-Hernández, Andrés
AU - Aragon, Diana
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
Copyright 2009 ACM.
PY - 2009/10/26
Y1 - 2009/10/26
N2 - There has been much recent interest in the development of tools to foster remote collaboration and shared creative work. An open question is: what are the guidelines for this process? What are the key socio-technical preconditions required for a geographically distributed group to collaborate effectively on creative work, and are they different from the conditions of a decade or two ago? In an attempt to answer these questions, we conducted empirical studies of two seemingly very different online communities, both requiring effective collaboration and creative work: an international collaboration of astrophysicists studying supernovae to learn more about the expansion rate of the universe, and a group of children, ages 8-15, from different parts of the world, creating and sharing animated stories and video games on the Scratch online community developed at MIT. Both groups produced creative technical work jointly and were considered successful in their communities. Data included the analysis of thousands of lines from chat and comment logs over a period of several months, and interviews with community members. We discovered some surprising commonalities and some intriguing possibilities, and suggest guidelines for successful creative collaborations. Specifically, systems that support social creativity must facilitate sharing and play, and their design must consider the effects of repurposing, augmentation and behavior adaptation.
AB - There has been much recent interest in the development of tools to foster remote collaboration and shared creative work. An open question is: what are the guidelines for this process? What are the key socio-technical preconditions required for a geographically distributed group to collaborate effectively on creative work, and are they different from the conditions of a decade or two ago? In an attempt to answer these questions, we conducted empirical studies of two seemingly very different online communities, both requiring effective collaboration and creative work: an international collaboration of astrophysicists studying supernovae to learn more about the expansion rate of the universe, and a group of children, ages 8-15, from different parts of the world, creating and sharing animated stories and video games on the Scratch online community developed at MIT. Both groups produced creative technical work jointly and were considered successful in their communities. Data included the analysis of thousands of lines from chat and comment logs over a period of several months, and interviews with community members. We discovered some surprising commonalities and some intriguing possibilities, and suggest guidelines for successful creative collaborations. Specifically, systems that support social creativity must facilitate sharing and play, and their design must consider the effects of repurposing, augmentation and behavior adaptation.
KW - Collective creativity
KW - Computer-mediated communication
KW - Computer-supported cooperative work
KW - Social creativity
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84962124530&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=84962124530&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1145/1640233.1640239
DO - 10.1145/1640233.1640239
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:84962124530
T3 - C and C 2009 - Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition
SP - 9
EP - 18
BT - C and C 2009 - Proceedings of the 2009 ACM SIGCHI Conference on Creativity and Cognition
PB - Association for Computing Machinery, Inc
Y2 - 27 October 2009 through 30 October 2009
ER -