Leadership and Success Factors in Online Creative Collaboration

Social computing systems have enabled new and "wildly successful forms of creative collaboration to take place. Two of the best-known examples are Wikipedia and the open-source software (OSS) movement. Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, boasts millions of articles (over 3-6 million just in English) written by thousands of volunteers col laborating via the Internet. The OSS movement, also fueled mainly by volun teer online collaboration, has produced some of the "world's most powerful and important software applications, includ ing the Apache HTTP Server, the Linux operating system, and the Mozilla Firefox Web browser. Many Wikipedia articles and OSS projects have been demon strated to be equal or superior in quality to their commercial competitors. But how is this possible? Why do online col laborations like these succeed, and what lessons can we learn from them?