Paper Reading #2: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration (18)

Comments

http://stuartjchi.blogspot.com/2011/01/reading-2-edits-credits-exploring_24.html

http://ryankerbow.blogspot.com/2011/01/reading-2-edits-credits-exploring.html

Reference Information

   Title: Edits & Credits: Exploring Integration and Attribution in Online Creative Collaboration

   Author: Kurt Luther

   Publisher: CHI 2010: Imagine all the People, April 10-15, 2010.

Summary

There are many online communities that use "attribution" to survive. Attribution allows "online reputations to be formed" and serves to "motivate many contributions to online creative collaboration". People spend their free time editing freely accessed projects such as Wikipedia and Linux for a variety of reasons including political motivations, altruism or most commonly, to increase "one's status within a community". The system is set up in such a way that each person's reputation is consistent with their their persistent identity, a name that typically keeps track of all of that person's contributions.
The study considers Newgrounds, a large flash animation portal with over 1.8 million registered members and over 160,000 uploaded animated movies and games. A popular way these movies/games are created are through a "collab", a collaborative animation project. A collab typically consists of one or two leaders and up to 50 or more artists.

There are many challenges faced by this sort of collaboration style, most dealt with by the collab leader. With so many viewpoints and ideas circulating around, it can be hard to integrate everyone's contributions. A balance must be struck between quality and inclusion. Attribution (coauthorship) can also be difficult because Newgrounds has a "multi-author system" (MAS) that only allows for 10 contributors to be given credit. Contribution is based on a criteria that the author must go through in deciding his coauthors.
Luther goes on to discuss the importance of integration and attribution in the collaborative process. There must be a simultaneous editing and crediting process, as he calls, "cr-editing".

Discussion

I found this article to be quite interesting, although I do not participate in any forums or communities such as this one. I'm sure many of my classmates do, however. I did find it interesting that a lot of what motivates people to participate is acceptance within a community. This social hunger to be either accepted or seen as cool (smart, whatever) is interesting to see.

Image: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/11/Newgrounds.jpg/200px-Newgrounds.jpg