Redistributing leadership in online creative collaboration

Crowdsourcing systems accomplish large tasks with scale and speed by breaking work down into independent parts. However, many types of complex creative work, such as fiction writing, have remained out of reach for crowds because work is tightly interdependent: changing one part of a story may trigger changes to the overall plot and vice versa. Taking inspiration from how expert authors write, we propose a technique for achieving interdependent complex goals with crowds. With this technique, the crowd loops between reflection, to select a high-level goal, and revision, to decompose that goal into low-level, actionable tasks. We embody this approach in Mechanical Novel, a system that crowdsources short fiction stories on Amazon Mechanical Turk. In a field experiment, Mechanical Novel resulted in higher-quality stories than an iterative crowdsourcing workflow. Our findings suggest that orienting crowd work around high-level goals may enable workers to coordinate their effort to accomplish complex work.

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“…In other work, leaders and collaborators work together more directly; in animation production [27], writing [17,29], and ideation [8] …”

Section: Crowdsourcing With Global Goals In Mindmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mechanical Novel: Crowdsourcing Complex Work Through Reflection and Revision

Kim¹,

Sterman²,

Cohen³

et al. 2017

Understanding Innovation

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“…As another example, interfaces that allow users to make judgments about the trustworthiness of others are essential for successful online collaborations [32]. Leaders of collaborations, too, often bear a large burden to maintain group awareness, but interfaces can mitigate this responsibility by making group activity, signals of trust, and tasks to be completed concrete and transparent to the larger collaborating group [33]. Models of successful creative processes [42]-information that is normally invisible-could even be embedded in tools to encourage best practices, help creators find suitable collaborators, or help them figure out how to proceed in their work [37].…”

Section: Online Creative Communitiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mosaic: Designing Online Creative Communities for Sharing Works-in-Progress

Kim¹,

Agrawala²,

Bernstein³

2017

Understanding Innovation

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“…This framework considers different concepts, as for e.g. distributed leadership [21] to ensure better team performance [24]. They describe the interaction between team members out of their conducted case study.…”

Section: Interpretation Of Communication Patterns Among Different Behmentioning

confidence: 99%