Saturday, October 10, 2009
Paper Session Three
2:00 pm – 3:30 pm
Global Virtual Teaming: A Correlation of Survey Data with Network Structure from Email
Julia Gluesing, Wayne State University | Ken Riopelle, Wayne State University | Peter Gloor, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence | Kai Fischbach, University of Cologne), Tuomas Niinimäki, University of Helsinki | Chris Miller, Savannah College of Art and Design
The paper presents the results of a Global Virtual Team (GVT) Survey that assessed five key dimensions of team performance that are known to impact team performance overall: Mission and Objectives, the Characteristics of Team Members, Team Processes, and the impact of Information Technology and Team Context. The GVT survey results were correlated to the network structure and semantic data gathered through email using Condor.
Both the survey and email data were gathered in an online COINS (Collaborative Online Innovation Networks) course, which included computer science and information technology students from the University of Cologne and the University of Helsinki, and design students from the Savannah College of Art and Design during the 2008 fall term. Students in the COINS course voluntarily participated in an automated form of social network analysis on their email correspondence throughout the course. They were also asked to complete the GVT survey after they had been working together for about three months. We examined the relationship between students’ perceptions of their team’s processes and performance and data obtained from Condor such as average response time (ART) for emails and the emotional content of emails (Positivity Index). The paper concludes with recommendations for future online collaborative classes.
Flash Collabs: Collaborative Innovation Networks in Online Communities of Animators
Kurt Luther | Amy Bruckman, GVU Center & School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech
Collaborative innovation networks (COINs) and swarm creativity is often studied in a professional business context. We propose that studying COINs of amateurs and non-business contexts provides a crucial and complementary perspective on these phenomena. By broadening the scope of COINs research to encompass these edge cases, we can begin to identify patterns and trends that persist across different contexts. For the past three years, we have been studying COINs in a novel context: online communities of Flash animators who collaborate over the internet to create animated movies and games called “collabs.” From a quantitative analysis of nearly 900 collabs on Newgrounds.com, we found that these projects can be highly successful, attracting hundreds of thousands of Internet audience members to download the completed animations. Our analysis also demonstrated that is possible to predict the success potential of a collab by examining specific factors, including attributes of the leader, organizational structures, and activity patterns within a collab.
Our focus in this research has been on the social dynamics within collabs, especially the role of leadership. Through in-depth interviews with collab participants, we found that collabs are typically created by groups of amateurs, or in some cases, animation students, often located around the world and speaking differentlanguages. Their motivations tend to be social-psychological—such as learning, reputation, social support, and self-efficacy—rather than financial, and almost everyone contributes as an unpaid volunteer. We also found that a shared goal of almost every collab participants with whom we spoke was to create something original; that is, a movie or game that audiences perceived as unique. To this end, collab participants are constantly experimenting with new processes, team compositions, and artistic styles. We have identified notable similarities and differences between collabs and other COINs involved with entertainment production. Collab participants emulate the professional filmmaking community in that they recruit mainly through social networks; in contrast to movie studios, however, collabs are organized entirely online, via discussion forums, blogs, and instant messaging. This process is facilitated by online reputation markers, such as digital histories of past contributions. Another similarity between the film set and the collab production process is that both operate in a hierarchical fashion, with one individual at the top, the “benevolent dictator,” maintaining the ultimate creative direction and authority. This finding contradicts the received wisdom of online collaborations, which holds that flattened hierarchies make decisions in a democratic or meritocratic fashion. Finally, in contrast to professional filmmaking, we found that the division of labor in collabs is often modularized, rather than specialized. Collab leaders typically assign entire scenes to individual animators to be recombined upon completion. This modularization allows animators to work independently and in parallel to sidestep some of the challenges posed by distributed collaboration. The breadth and potential of COINs, as illuminated by our ongoing study of collabs, continues to surprise and inspire us. Our future work includes (1) developing software tools to support collabs and (2) relating these findings to other forms of online creative collaboration.
Polyvore Collaboration: Innovation in Informal Online Affiliation Networks
Andrew Feldstein, Virginia State University School of Business | Brent Wilson, Professor Emeritus, Penn State University School of the Visual Arts
Online communities engaged in collaborative exchange exhibit characteristics of spontaneous communitas as defined by Victor Turner (1982). How is collaborative innovation influenced by protostructural liminal internet contexts which encourage visual and verbal transactions among users? A social network analysis of activities in the Polyvore internet community maps the behavior of members as they oscillate between liminoid transactions and structured integration. An affiliation network is a two-mode network consisting of a set of actors and a set of events. In his seminal paper on affiliation networks Breiger (1974) explores the duality of actors and events. From the perspective of the actor, people are connected by experiencing the same visual/verbal event. The duality comes into play once we accept that the converse also applies and events become related through the presence of common actors. (Breiger 1974)
This paper studies one specific affiliation network as it develops within the Polyvore community. Polyvore is a web-based application consisting of a simple yet sophisticated drag and drop editor that allows members to invent hybrid collages, known as ‘sets’, using images easily clipped from the web. Nine hundred thousand Polyvore community members publish their sets and share them with other Polyvorians. Polyvore members acknowledge each other indirectly by tagging other members’ collages to indicate that they “like” that specific set. Common patterns of behavior emerge. Reciprocity develops between members as individuals tend to view, appropriate, and modify the sets of members who have tagged them. Subgroups and cliques form as themes develop within collage sets. Their informal collaborations lead to the creation of themed galleries. The objective of this research is to track innovation resulting from informal community collaboration by tracing the development of relationships linking members through specific sets and subsequent collaboration.
Reflection of @SCAD.edu – A Virtual Mirror of Email Communication
Marc Egger | Hauke Führes, University of Cologne
E‐mail is a key communication media at universities. This paper describes a visualization system for e‐mails as anonymized communication entities, by depicting the growing social network of students and staff at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). Our system offers a dynamic view of the communication network of participants. It displays a live view of the evolving communication structure. To create self‐awareness of their own social network, participants may get a real‐time visualization of their own communication behavior. Our visualization system emphasizes the data gathering process needed to collect the e‐mails: Showing the e‐mail communication at the moment of its creation requires continuous real‐time collecting and processing of the messages sent. Besides visualizing the social network constituted by the messages sent at SCAD the presented system also integrates the topics the participants are discussing in an anonymized way. The discussed topics are matched with the tweets of the social media service Twitter, allowing to see what the Twitter users think and feel about topics mentioned in the messages collected. Extracting the topics to be mirrored in Twitter is separated from particular e‐mail addresses and full contents to maintain the privacy of each message sent. In order to arouse the curiosity of users of the email visualization and prospective participants, the sentiment extracted from the social media service is translated to QR codes, which can be deciphered with cell phones. The visualization of the communication runs as a self‐contained system, without the need for further user interaction. Crucial to the acceptance of the described system is the respect for privacy of the participant. Users have to opt‐in to use the system. Senders and receivers of the emails are anonymized. Topics extracted from the e‐mail subjects cannot be linked to particular communication.
Collaboration for Sustainability in a Networked World
Rebecca Petzel | Alice‐Marie Archer | Rong Fei, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona Sweden
This paper explores how the web’s collaborative potential can be harnessed strategically and practically towards sustainability. With the success of web‐scale collaborations such as Wikipedia and Linux in mind, the researchers sought to understand how web‐enabled collaborations could be used strategically, particularly to support innovation for sustainability. Building on a body of research led by Peter Gloor at MIT into collaborative innovation networks (COINs), a framework for collaborative organizational networks supporting innovation, this paper evaluates COINs’ strategic potential for sustainability utilizing the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development and the approach of backcasting. Simultaneously the researchers engaged in a three‐month social action research project to develop and test theories as to the practical application of COINs for sustainability. Themes explored through this action research include leadership, communication, motivation, and the architecture of participation for successful, strategic COINs. Results indicate that COINs can provide a strategic and effective way to work towards sustainability because they harness collective intelligence towards innovation and support distributed working styles. Additionally they provide an organizational framework that supports socially sustainable modes of working. However COINs can amplify the impact of unsustainable innovations, so a strong systems perspective based on principles of sustainability is required to use COINs strategically. The final product of this research is a set of recommendations for people considering utilizing COINs for sustainability.
Are Fight Crowds smarter than Expert Bookies? Comparing fight outcome predictions made by fans to those made by experts
Prof. Sean Wise | Milan Miric | Les Hansen
While crowd wisdom has manifested itself in several successful business applications, most notably predictive markets, there has been few objective long term measures of the fundamental principle: Is a crowd smarter and more insightful than a group of experts. This study aimed to test the wisdom of crowds principle through the mechanism of predictive sports markets on the basis of fan based fight outcome predictions (done through the use of SMS voting) of UFC fight outcomes (crowd) as compared to the fight outcome predications made by Las Vegas and Online bookmakers (experts). This mechanism was chosen as a predictor of crowd wisdom aiming to compare simultaneously tabulated. The aim was to contrast these differing predictions taken at the same point in time.
The UFC, i.e. the Ulitmate Fighting Championship, is a p2p, one on one, pugilistic competition involving a wide variety of skill sets including but not limited to: boxing, wrestling, muh thai and jui jitsu. The UFC has existed since the early ‘90s, with the current format being adopted over 5 years ago. The current format sees two contenders combat one another for three 5 minute rounds. To win a combatant must: force his opponent to submit (i.e. tap out); damage his opponent to the point where he cannot intelligently defend themselves, or impress a panel of 3 judges who rank the fight based on a point system. Our research covers a period of 3 years and compared the results of fan text messaging to the odds placed by professional bookmakers where such results were made public ally available.
Over these three years, the UFC held Pay Per View events almost monthly. For those events that took place in the United States of America, text message voting by fans was encouraged. However, results were not always made public. In total 100 number of pay per views occurred. Of such 13 produced both bookmaker results and fan voting results. Comparing event outcomes against predictions of both crowds and experts, it was found that 92.3% of event outcomes were accurately predicted by crowds of viewers in contrast to 67.4% from experts (bookies). While this does not provide, or aim to provide insight into betting mechanisms or suggest arbitrage opportunities it does provide a metric for crowd opinion removed from the bias of financial reward. Notwithstanding, for this limited data set, the crowd was indeed much wiser than the experts.
This study concluded that crowds did provide more accurate predictions than bookmakers at least at a binary level (Win – Loss). However, the scope of this study was limited by access to primary UFC fan voting data, which was denied to the researchers. Future work might aim to extend these trials to a study of the complete history of UFC fights aiming to conclusively prove that crowds predict more accurately than experts.
