Leadership in online creative collaboration

  • Authors:

  • Kurt Luther;Amy Bruckman

  • Affiliations:

  • Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA;Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

Leadership plays a central role in the success of many forms of online creative collaboration, yet little is known about the challenges leaders must manage. In this paper, we report on a qualitative study of leadership in three online communities whose members collaborate over the Internet to create computer-animated movies called "collabs." Our results indicate that most collabs fail. Collab leaders face two major challenges. First, leaders must design collabora-tive projects. Second, leaders must manage artists during the collab production process. We contrast these challenges with the available empirical research on leadership in open-source software and Wikipedia, identifying four themes: originality, completion, subjectivity, and ownership. We conclude with broader implications for online creative col-laboration in its many forms.