Why it works (when it works): success factors in online creative collaboration
Kurt Luther, Kelly Caine, Kevin Ziegler, and Amy Bruckman. 2010. Why it works (when it works): success factors in online creative collaboration. In Proceedings of the 16th ACM international conference on Supporting group work (GROUP ’10). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1-10. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/1880071.1880073
Summary:
In this paper, because of the success of creative collaborations, the author focused on what are the underlying principles allowing online creative collaboration to succeed, and how well do they transfer from one domain to another? Wikipedia and the open-source-software(OSS) are two famous and most-researched examples. And the paper addressed these issues on the topic of animated movie-making which has little research attention. Also, the author focused their analysis on success, which is a most-studied topic in online creative collaboration research. The success in collabs is quite different from other collaboration which means completing a collab. The results of these collabs would be “successful” or “failed”. While in the OSS, success is complicated because of its ongoing, and evolutionary nature. And these kinds of projects would never be finished. And there are many different classifications and measures to define whether success or not. Based on the qualitative study, the author found one potential principle is the importance of leaders with particular characteristics. A second potential principle is about communication. Successful projects could boast frequent communication and high activity. After these experiments and analytics, there are still many questions and challenges need to be studied in the future. Like why the success rate for both OSS projects and collabs were low.
Reflection:
From this paper, we can know there are many success factors could affect the result of OSS projects and collabs, like intrinsic motivation and self-selection for tasks, leaders, rational cultures, the granular division of labor, and use of collaborative technologies. Each of these factors could play an important role in the final result. The part in the qualitative study that I like most is that the participants are from different country and were ranged in skill and experience from novice to expert. These differences between each participant could give us useful information, instead of basis. Even they have different background information, they might still work in the same collabs or projects in the future.
Discussion:
According to the paper, the success rates for both OSS projects and collabs were kind of so low, less than 20%. What are the reasons caused these situations?
Even though the paper has already listed many success factors, are there any other success factors still play important parts in these online collaboration projects? Like education background?