Comments: Ryan Kerbow, Aaron Kirkes.
Authors: Kurt Luther, Nicholas Diakopoulos, and Amy Bruckman
Venue: CHI 2010; Atlanta, Georgia; April 10-15
Summary: The authors of this article begin by explaining how attribution and "credit" are an extremely efficient motivator for online collaborative, often philanthropic efforts. They explain how this dynamic is at play in open source projects, collaborative wikis, and more creative works.
For the rest of their article, they choose to focus on Newgrounds.com, a popular online Flash portal. Early on in Newground's history, animiators have organically gotten together and created a system of collaboration known a "Collab". Collabs have two main formats: A heavily-structure call for pieces of a certain quality, or a "first come, first served" model, where quality is generally forsaken in the name of having a large amount of collaborators.
Collabs are gathered by a leader, who's job it is to integrate the collected pieces into one cohesive piece of animation. This can actually be one of the most difficult jobs, since a poorly arranged collaboration can have clashing animation styles juxtaposed against each other, or a collaboration where the style is too uniform can come off as bland, and not worthy of a collaboration in the first place.
Discussion: On the whole, this was a fairly good article. When I first read that it was about Newgrounds, I was worried that it was someone trying to turn their internet pass time into a research paper. However, it did a very good job of analyzing the Collab culture which has sprung up around Newgrounds.com. It seemed like a missed opportunity to bring up open source projects and wikis without also analyzing those collaboration and credit cultures. It seemed like there would have been some interesting parallels you could draw between Flash artists and open source programmers.
I'm not familiar with Newgrounds.com, but I can see why it was used to illustrate how attribution and "credit" play a role in online (collaborative) efforts. This does make me wonder: what else could serve as a motivator to create quality pieces, if not money or attribution?
ReplyDeleteI thought it was interesting that flash games and movies were so collaborative. I thought that the community was relatively small.
ReplyDeleteI agree. I feel like they missed a good opportunity to talk about the driving force behind collabs mainly because you need artists, but they get "dissed" quite a bit, but they keep coming back. Surely they're not all masochists.
ReplyDeleteOpen source projects also have issues with crediting, but the system for that is in place and as far as I know is pretty reliable. I feel like they focused on this collaborations because they are a reasonably new thing, and the crediting system is still in a de facto beta, as it were.
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