Flash Collabs: Collaborative Innovation Networks in Online Communities of Animators

Abstract 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 different languages. Their motivations tend to be socialpsychological—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.