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Leadership in online creative collaboration

Published: 08 November 2008 Publication History

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.

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cover image ACM Conferences
CSCW '08: Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
November 2008
752 pages
ISBN:9781605580074
DOI:10.1145/1460563
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 08 November 2008

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  1. animation
  2. leadership
  3. online creative collaboration

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November 8 - 12, 2008
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