Internet forum stimulates creative cooperation

By: John Bennett

Published: Friday, April 15, 2005

A filmmaker needs cast and crew for her movie. A photographer wants to shoot headshots for actors. The leader of a student organization is looking for a graphic designer to work on her club’s promotional materials. Savannah College of Art and Design students who want  to make these types of connections have traditionally pounded the pavement, placed fliers in college buildings and hoped for a response. Not anymore.

Collaboration Station, hosted by The Hive, now allows students to announce cast and crew calls, volunteer their expertise, and forge creative partnerships with students within their own majors and students from other departments.

“Collaboration Station is a way to match students in need of certain services or talents with other students who may be able to help them,” said Andrea Houseman, a historic preservation major who coordinates student organization site hosting on The Hive. “Many of the majors at SCAD complement each other and some even tend to be parallel. This is a way these students can find each other without posting a million fliers and depending only on word of mouth. Even better — faculty and other departments of SCAD can use this to find student actors, artists and help in general.”

Although these types of connections have been facilitated on The Hive since its launch in September 2002, Collaboration Station marks a more formal and structured approach, designed to make it easier for students to cooperate interdepartmentally. Students can subscribe to individual threads and receive instant e-mail notification when others respond to their posts.

Gresham Lochner, content director for The Hive, said, “Over the past several months students have shown increased interest in working with other students on projects.  We saw increased traffic through various forums directed toward the subject of ‘collaboration.’  Because of this, we felt that it was imperative to create a separate section specifically for the students’ needs.”

The Hive’s moderators have adopted an aggressive posture when monitoring posts in Collaboration Station forums to keep threads on topic and prevent students from having to navigate through unrelated messages.

Brandon Ashworth, director of The Hive, has been pleased with the response Collaboration Station has received already.

“So far the site has had a very good response. Within days of launch, it had more than 20 posts from people looking for help with their projects or wanting to work on other people’s projects. I myself have not posted yet, but I will soon to offer visual effects and Web development help to other students,” he said.

A quick scan of Collaboration Station posts reveals students seeking costume designers, jewelry designers and writers. Other students have volunteered their services as editors, sound designers and actors.

Ashworth predicts the effectiveness of Collaboration Station will increase in direct proportion to the number of students who use it.

“Once more students find out about it, it will grow to be a place were most of the college comes to find people to help out on projects. Students from almost every major need some sort of assistance. With more users we can grow and help more students.”

Ashworth said The Hive is an ideal venue for collaboration as it already has a content management system, message board environment and moderation staff capable of keeping pace with student demand. In addition, The Hive already has a large clientele, all of whom are members of the SCAD community.

“We have a large user base of more that 3,600 members and you can be sure that every person who posts is a SCAD student, staff member, faculty member or graduate of the college,” he said.

Because The Hive’s members represent all majors at the college and not one particular school or department, the opportunities for new kinds of cooperation between students are unlimited.

“It’s a very diverse community,” Houseman said.

Collaboration Station is entirely student-run, which means it will be very responsive to students’ needs, Lochner said.

“The users have the power over the new feature,” he said. “They will make it what they want. We are always open to new ideas. If students feel that it’s lacking something or needs improvement, we will work with them to make it better for them and the entire student body.”

For more information on Collaboration Station, visit The Hive.