  Many Web platforms rely on user collaboration to generate high-quality
content: Wiki, Q&A communities, etc. Understanding and modeling the different
collaborative behaviors is therefore critical. However, collaboration patterns
are difficult to capture when the relationships between users are not directly
observable, since they need to be inferred from the user actions. In this work,
we propose a solution to this problem by adopting a systemic view of
collaboration. Rather than modeling the users as independent actors in the
system, we capture their coordinated actions with embedding methods which can,
in turn, identify shared objectives and predict future user actions.
  To validate our approach, we perform a study on a dataset comprising more
than 16M user actions, recorded on the online collaborative sandbox Reddit
r/place. Participants had access to a drawing canvas where they could change
the color of one pixel at every fixed time interval. Users were not grouped in
teams nor were given any specific goals, yet they organized themselves into a
cohesive social fabric and collaborated to the creation of a multitude of
artworks. Our contribution in this paper is multi-fold: i) we perform an
in-depth analysis of the Reddit r/place collaborative sandbox, extracting
insights about its evolution over time; ii) we propose a predictive method that
captures the latent structure of the emergent collaborative efforts; and iii)
we show that our method provides an interpretable representation of the social
structure.
