Icmje

Group Process and Productivity

In story writing, the diverse perspectives of the crowd could support an author's search for the perfect character, setting, or plot. However, structuring crowd collaboration is challenging. Too little structure leads to unfocused, sprawling narratives, and too much structure stifles creativity. Motivated by the idea that individual creative leaders and the crowd have complementary creative strengths, we present an approach where a leader directs the high-level vision for a story and articulates creative constraints for the crowd. This approach is embodied in Ensemble, a novel collaborative story-writing platform. In a month-long short story competition, over one hundred volunteer users on the web started over fifty short stories using Ensemble. Leaders used the platform to direct collaborator work by establishing creative goals, and collaborators contributed meaningful, high-level ideas to stories through specific suggestions. This work suggests that asymmetric creative contributions may support a broad new class of creative collaborations.

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Ensemble: exploring complementary strengths of leaders and crowds in creative collaboration

This paper presents the MicroWriter, a system that decomposes the task of writing into three types of microtasks to produce a single report: 1) generating ideas, 2) labeling ideas to organize them, and 3) writing paragraphs given a few related ideas. Because each microtask can be completed individually with limited awareness of what has been already done and what others are doing, this decomposition can change the experience of collaborative writing. Prior work has used microtasking to support collaborative writing with unaffiliated crowd workers. To instead study its impact on collaboration among writers with context and investment in the writing project, we asked six groups of co-workers (or 19 people in total) to use the MicroWriter in a synchronous, collocated setting to write a report about a shared work goal. Our observations suggest ways that recent advances in microtasking and crowd work can be used to support collaborative writing within preexisting groups.

/pdf/supporting-collaborative-writing-with-microtasks-z3vkfe1x3l.pdf

Supporting Collaborative Writing with Microtasks

The physical constraints of smartwatches limit the range and complexity of tasks that can be completed. Despite interface improvements on smartwatches, the promise of enabling productive work remains largely unrealized. This paper presents WearWrite, a system that enables users to write documents from their smartwatches by leveraging a crowd to help translate their ideas into text. WearWrite users dictate tasks, respond to questions, and receive notifications of major edits on their watch. Using a dynamic task queue, the crowd receives tasks issued by the watch user and generic tasks from the system. In a week-long study with seven smartwatch users supported by approximately 29 crowd workers each, we validate that it is possible to manage the crowd writing process from a watch. Watch users captured new ideas as they came to mind and managed a crowd during spare moments while going about their daily routine. WearWrite represents a new approach to getting work done from wearables using the crowd.

/pdf/wearwrite-crowd-assisted-writing-from-smartwatches-qn4vunfxy4.pdf

WearWrite: Crowd-Assisted Writing from Smartwatches

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of thirty authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

/pdf/massively-distributed-authorship-of-academic-papers-c7mkl15meq.pdf

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Wiki-like or crowdsourcing models of collaboration can provide a number of benefits to academic work. These techniques may engage expertise from different disciplines, and potentially increase productivity. This paper presents a model of massively distributed collaborative authorship of academic papers. This model, developed by a collective of 31 authors, identifies key tools and techniques that would be necessary or useful to the writing process. The process of collaboratively writing this paper was used to discover, negotiate, and document issues in massively authored scholarship. Our work provides the first extensive discussion of the experiential aspects of large-scale collaborative research.

Fabio Romancini Palamedi

Papers

Massively distributed authorship of academic papers

Massively Distributed Authorship of Academic Papers