I am working on my Masters project with Kurt Luther and Amy Bruckman. We are looking at how people collaborate on artistic projects online. For my part of the project, I am specifically looking at 3d collaboration on several popular 3d graphic communities. Kurt has been looking at collaboration in Flash animation.

It would seem that there should be more collaboration overall in 3d graphics because the project roles are very separated and well-defined and because the pieces created can be reused even if the project itself fails, but we are not finding this to be the case. One of the driving questions behind my part of the research is why this is so. We will also be looking at the similarities between the 2d and 3d collaborations to find general patterns in online creative collaborations and perhaps come up with ways that people can work better together on these types of projects.

Right now I am still in the middle of gathering data. I am conducting phone interviews and a survey with participants from a couple of different graphics websites. I am still not sure what I think is going on, yet, but you're welcome to contact me if you want to hear the current theory.