Major: Massively Amateur Creativity

传统上，支持创造力的软件工具主要是为专业人员组成的小团队设计的。然而，随着互联网和廉价计算机系统的兴起，这些工具的使用正在带来新的创造性合作，在这种合作中，创造性活动不像过去那样分布在一小群专业人员中，而是分布在全球数万人中，其中许多人是非专业人员。在这项研究中，研究人员重现了两次大规模合作的历史--一次是关于视频游戏的短电影，另一次是大规模的在线手工艺社区--以了解它们是如何取得非凡成功的。科学界对这种大规模的合作非常感兴趣。今天的许多研究问题都涉及到海量数据集和计算能力。解决这些问题需要世界各地数千名研究人员的合作，而不是实验室里一个小团队成员之间的合作。调查人员正在研究的在线社区已经找到了大规模分配他们的生产力的方法，并取得了成功。这项研究试图理解这一成功，并为其建模。这种模式可导致设计软件工具，以支持大规模的创造性协作，例如在科学领域，并有助于澄清支持这些协作所需的组织和通信环境。

Software tools that support creativity have traditionally been designed primarily for small teams of professionals. However, with the rise of the Internet and inexpensive computer systems, the use of these tools is leading to new creative collaborations, where creative activity is distributed not across a small team of professionals as in the past, but rather across tens of thousands of people around the globe, many of whom are non-professionals. In this research, the investigators reconstruct the history of two such massive collaborations--one involving short movies about video games and the other involving a massive online crafting community--to understand how their phenomenal success evolved. There is considerable interest in the scientific community in such large-scale collaborations. Many research problems today involve massive data sets and computational power. Solving these problems requires the collaboration of thousands of researchers around the world, rather than collaboration among the members of a small team in a lab. The online communities the investigators are studying have found ways to distribute their productivity on a massive scale and found success with it. This research seeks to understand and model that success. Such a model could lead to the design of software tools to support massive creative collaboration, e.g., in the sciences, as well as helping to clarify the organizational and communications environments needed to support them.