Creative networks : socio-technical systems for loosely bound cooperation

This thesis introduces a programming environment entitled Share that is designed to support and encourage loosely bound cooperation between individuals within communities of practice through the sharing of code. Loosely bound cooperation refers to the opportunity members of communities have to assist and share resources with one another while maintaining their autonomy and independent practice. We contrast this model with forms of collaboration that enable large numbers of distributed individuals to collaborate on large scale works where they are guided by a shared vision of what they are collectively trying to achieve. Our hypothesis is that providing fine-grained, publicly visible attribution of code sharing activity within a community can provide socially motivated encouragement for participation as well as pragmatic value of being able to better track downstream use and changes to contributions that an individual makes. We shall present a discussion of loosely bound collaborative practice in various creative domains and the technological and social factors that contribute to the salience of these forms of cooperation today as well as discussing the motivational factors associated with open source development and how they differ in the case of cooperating individuals who do not share a project. We will also present an overview of the design of our tool and the objectives that guided its design and a discussion of a small-scale deployment of our prototype among members of a particular community of practice.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2009

Author dc:creator

• Assogba, Yannick Mahugnon

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Judith Donath.

• Architecture. Program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/55192

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/55192