Investigating Collaboration Within Online Communities: Software Development Vs. Artistic Creation
This work addresses the challenge of enhancing collaboration in online creative arts communities, which is incremental as it builds on existing knowledge from software development.
The research tackles the problem of understanding factors for successful collaboration in online creative arts communities by leveraging insights from open source software communities, aiming to improve communication, collaboration, and retention.
Online creative communities have been able to develop large, open source software (OSS) projects like Linux and Firefox throughout the successful collaborations carried out over the Internet. These communities have also expanded to creative arts domains such as animation, video games, and music. Despite their growing popularity, the factors that lead to successful collaborations in these communities are not entirely understood. In the following, I describe my PhD research project aimed at improving communication, collaboration, and retention in creative arts communities, starting from the experience gained from the literature about OSS communities.