Cooperation and Attribution in an Online Community of Young Creators Andr´ es Monroy-Hern´ andez Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA andresmh@media.mit.edu Benjamin Mako Hill Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Ave Cambridge, MA mako@mit.edu ABSTRACT This poster analyzes the Scratch Online Community, 1 a web- site 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 gener- ated 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 ef- fect 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. Author Keywords online communities, computers and children, creativity sup- port tools, social computing and social navigation, computer mediated ACM Classification Keywords H.5.3 Group and Organization Interfaces Information Inter- faces and Presentation: Computer-supported cooperative work General Terms Design, Human Factors INTRODUCTION The Scratch online community is a website where young people share their animated stories, interactive art, and video games. Children and novices use the Scratch programming environment [3] to create their projects by controlling im- ages and sounds using visual programming blocks. 1 http://scratch.mit.edu Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). CSCW 2010, February 610, 2010, Savannah, Georgia, USA. ACM 978-1-60558-795-0/10/02...$10.00. In the past two years, the website has been able to engage more than 81,000 kids in creating more than 700,000 projects that range from political cartoons to replicas of popular video games to fractal generators. The age of the participants ranges primarily from 8 to 16 with most around 12. At the time writing, the community shares more than 1,200 projects per day, some of them original work and many others derivatives of other Scratch projects. In the spirit of the Free and Open Source Software move- ment, anyone can download any Scratch project on the web- site, open it up to see how it was created, make changes to it, and upload a new version back to the website, a process called remixing on Scratch. The practice of remixing has be- come more popular since the site’s public launch, when it made up 10-15% of all projects shared, to nearly twice that rate today. In total, 28% of all projects ever shared on the Scratch website are remixes and 68% of those are based on someone elses work. REMIXING AND INTERVENTIONS Building on the work of CSCW projects based around con- structionist learning[1], the Scratch online community’s ad- ministrators have made a conscious effort to promote remix- ing as a valid form of participation. For example, they have taken a public stance in favor of remixing through comments and projects. Additionally, they try to respond to comments when people equate remixing to “stealing.” Also, in every project page, they have added the statement “some rights reserved” and linked it to a Scratch-friendly version of the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license that was selected as the default for all projects shared on the web- site. 2 In addition, Scratch administrators intervened twice with technological changes intended to foster increased remix- ing. Automatic attribution Due to several complaints, administrators implemented a mech- anism that automatically gave attribution by displaying a link to antecedent projects on every remix along with the user name of any antecedent project’s creator. The site also added links from each remixed project to every derivative work. However, due to the increased visibility of remixes, this intervention resulted in an increase in the total number 2 Scratch’s “License to Play” can be found at http://scratch.mit.edu/pages/license 469