Publication

Cooperation and attribution in an online community of young creators

Andres Monroy-Hernandez, Benjamin M. Hill

Abstract

This poster analyzes the Scratch Online Community,1 a website where thousands of children share animations and video games, to evaluate the effectiveness of attribution-focused interventions designed to foster increased cooperation. We analyzed two interventions designed to foster the creation of derivative works (i.e., remixing) and we found evidence that supports two propositions: (1) people value credit given by a person much more highly than automatic attribution generated from a system; and (2) community members' attitudes toward remixing can be influenced by positive framing in terms of community norms. We propose two experiments to further test these propositions. The first measures the effect of explicit credit by giving users the ability to explicitly acknowledgment other contributors. The second experiment involves sending positive or neutral notifications to people whose projects are remixed.

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