Sandbox Summit: Leadership in Online Collaboration

Plays Well With Others: Leadership in Online Collaboration
Amy Bruckman – Associate Professor, Georgia Tech

Showed a video:
Pass-My Flash2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFf8399UZMI

This movie was made by 7 different animators aged 17 – 29 who had never met each other. How did they do this?

WHY COLLABORATION MATTERS
Accomplishments are astounding:
- 61% of the web pages in the world built by apache, build by a bunch of people for free
- Firefox has 29% market share
- Wikipedia 8th most popular website.

What’s the next big thing and how do we facilitate that process?
One model is looking at how meaning is active – learning and meaning is active constructionism (Piaget’s Constructivism). Examples:
- LOGO
- LEGO Mindstorms
- StarLogo
- Scratch

Most constructiveness is inherently individual. The online community is a good example. The online community provides technical support, emotional support. The barrier between most people and the meaningful use of tech is emotional – some people are too afraid to try it. (eg people who are too afraid to comment on blogs)

COLLABORATION IS IMPORTANT:
- People can work together to create really innovative stuff, when that labor is co-ordinated effectively.
- When you include more people in the design and development, the thing you create shows the values of the people that contribute to it.
- People learn better when they are supported by other people (zone of proximal development)
- More educational theory is about the way people learn in realistic settings.

Legitimate Peripheral Participation
- Learning is a process of moving from the periphery to the center of a community practice.
- Online fosters a group interaction - Forms a community of practice.

MODES OF COLLABORATION
- REMIX: take someone else’s project and adapt it. However, each project has a single owner.

- BENEVOLENT DICTATORSHIP: Open Source Software follows this model. Someone starts a project, (eg Linux) and it has plausible promise. Then they show to other people who comment (eg find a bug or suggest a feature). Leader of the project accepts or declines submissions and adapts as necessary. Leader chooses and ultimately makes all decisions.

- OPEN CONTENT PUBLISHING: People working in parallel (eg. Wikipedia). No one tells anyone what to do – people edit and re-edit. In many cases, vandalism is often fixed in a matter of seconds. People check one another’s work. Surprisingly, content is very efficient and very accurate overall. A good example was the English article about the Japan earthquake – it’s comprehensive and factually correct. The more prominent a page, the more accurate it tends to be.


Coordination in Peer Production
Yochai benkler, “Coase’s Penguin”

Projects suitable for peer production must have:
- Modular contributions
- Small-grain size of each contribution
- Easy integration of parts

What inhibits people from contributing? (Bystander effect)
- Social cues
- Self awareness
- Diffuse responsibility
- Blocking

What encourages people to contribute:
Peter Kollock criteria:
- Expect help in return
- Improve reputation
- Efficacy – takes pleasure in having an effect on environment

Design Features can be used that can help people such as identity persistence, a group that has a sense of ‘us’ eg. Wikipedia now has wiki projects
If you have knowledge of interactions you are more likely to help, and particularly if it’s visible.


STUDY OF CREATIVE COLLABORATION
Valentine “29”
Narrative: in study, narrative of structure shapes the process of collaboration. Eg. A movie called Valentine ‘29’. Each one had s specific chapter so they were almost unique. If anything was not done properly, the person leading the project had to react. Also, people work in parallel.

Pass My Flash 2
Continuation: This was a continuation. You make a piece then hand it off to someone else. Work takes place not in process but in series. So bottleneck could take place at any step of the way.

When Farm Animals Attack
Collection: get assets in by a deadline, then the leader will accept and decline what they like then put them all together.

As you can see, there’s heavy demand on leaders in this collaborative process. They need to be strong producers.


CHARACTERISTICS OF COLLABORATION
- Is it a development in parallel or series?
- Does the final product need all contributions, or can some be filtered?
- Is the project ever ‘finished”?
- Is the creative style conventional or innovative?


A new suite of tools called ‘pipeline’ is being built to first try and scaffold existing process and transform it in an interesting way. This tool creates a more P2P open collaborative mode. People can automatically claim tasks, producers can set level of creative control. Alpha testing to be released at beginning of May.

How do you design a collaboration system? They’ve started by doing imperical studies. Then think up new possibilities, guided hy goal of broad diverse participation. Design tools to support new practicies.

This matters because they’re looking to see what the next Wikipedia or Linux? There is something else on the horizon that we can’t predict will work. Imagining new possibilities is an important research component. Also, tech increasingly surrounds the fabric of our day to day experience.