Creative Communities Initiative

The Creative Communities Initiative (CCI) at MIT uses ethnography to explore the intersection of online and offline worlds in an effort to identify new solutions to old problems. The phenomenal growth of online communities, new forms of leisure, social networking, and collaborative creativity in recent years has been facilitated in part by digital tools, but equally through social dynamics that build trust, rapport, and shared commitments.

CCI operates as a team of ethnographers who use participant-observation fieldwork to examine the workings of these communities. The topics we explore include: new business models for sustaining musicians in Japan and the US (Condry); E-sports and live streaming (Taylor); studies of bias in hiring for technology jobs (Barabas); and the maker movement in art museums (Gonzalez).  Past projects include the emerging video game industry in Peru (Marisca); the peer- or sharing-economies such as Etsy and AirBnB (Cheng).

What forms do successful communities take? What is the interplay between technological tools and collaborative creativity? How do such communities emerge, take shape, and evolve? We believe ethnography will illuminate the meaning and values of these communities in ways that mining data through algorithms alone cannot. Culture, politics and business are clearly changing as online communities become centers of production and political participation in their own right, challenging the power structures of traditional corporations and governmental institutions.