Fostering Social Creativity by Increasing Social Capital

Complex design problems require more knowledge than any single person can possess, and the knowledge relevant to a problem is often distributed among all stakeholders who have different perspectives and background knowledge, thus providing the foundation for social creativity. Bringing together different points of view and trying to create a shared understanding among all stakeholders can lead to new insights, new ideas, and new artifacts. Social creativity can be supported by innovative computer systems that allow all stakeholders to contribute to framing and solving these problems collaboratively. Technology alone, however, is not the complete answer to social creativity. Social capital that characterizes the features of a social group—such as networks, norms, and trust, which all facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit—is of critical importance to foster social creativity. In this paper, we discuss (1) the roles that social capital plays in facilitating social creativity and (2) approaches to increase social capital. We start by analyzing existing success models (Open Source and Experts Exchange) that support collaborative knowledge construction in order to create a conceptual framework to understand the social-technical aspects of promoting social capital. We further illustrate this conceptual framework with our own efforts in creating social capital-sensitive computer systems (e.g., Evolutionary Reuse Repositories, Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory, and Courses-as-Seeds) that support collaborative design, problem solving, and knowledge construction. These systems show the importance of encouraging users to act as active contributors and illustrate some of the motivational challenges upon which these systems rely. The assessment of these activities provides evidence that collaborative technologies are necessary, but not sufficient, to create more collaborative communities. Without a deep understanding of the motivation, reward structures, and the creation of new mindsets and organizations based on a greater emphasis of social capital, the impact of these new technologies will be negligible.