Creative contents community: A multimedia contents authoring environment for a new digital community

Abstract

A new paradigm is proposed for a network-based community called the "creative contents community". Typical examples of network based communities are bulletin boards and mailing lists, which have a "free talk" communications style but are not always productive. In the creative contents community, open and flexible human groups are formed with members having different skills, knowledge, viewpoints, etc, enabling them to create multimedia contents with a certain value. One of the models of such a community has many creators providing small pieces of a final output and a producer who gathers and edits these pieces into one artifact. A feasibility study was conducted at an elementary school where groups with creators and a producer were easily formed (i.e. students and a teacher). From the study, a newly developed authoring environment consisting of a Kids editor and a Producer tool was implemented in an experiment to create multi-media contents. The concept of the community model, the authoring environment and the results of the experiment are discussed in detail.