Creative Collaboration - "We-think"

There's a new online book from Charles Leadbeater about creative collaboration.  I snagged a couple of paragraphs from his site/blog because it jibes with what we've been yaking about, less eloquently, here, here, and here for the last three plus years. "People want to be players not just spectators, part of the action, not on the sidelines. "

Of course, even to this day and with so much being written about social network software, what many organizations are still failing to understand is that they can achieve similar benfits. FWIW - The process is really simple and cheap to start a pilot project.

Enjoy.

"We-think"

"Google is on the verge [google paid $1.65 billion] bidding £1bn for Youtube, a business little more than a year old. Wikipedia continues to draw more traffic than much more established media brands, employing hundreds more people. Open source programmes such as Linux insistently chip away at corporate providers of proprietary software. Immersive multi user computer games, such as Second Life, which depend on high levels of user participation and creativity are booming. Craigslist a self help approach to searching for jobs and other useful stuff is eating into the ad revenues of newspapers. Youth magazines such as Smash Hit have been overwhelmed by the rise of social networking sites such as MySpace and Bebo. What is going on?

"We-think, an exploration of and experiment in collaborative creativity.

"The basic argument is very simple. Most creativity is ollaborative. It combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. The opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding the whole time. The number of people who could be participants in these creative conversations is going up largely thanks to the communications technologies that now give voice to many more people and make it easier for them to connect. As a result we are developing new ways to be innovative and creative at mass scale. We can be organised without having an organisation. People can combine their ideas and skills without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities. Many of the ingredients of these forms of self-organised creative collaboration are not new - peer review for example has been around a long time in academia. But what is striking about Wikipedia, Linux, Second Life, Youtube and many more is the way they take familiar ingredients and combine them to allow people to collaborate creatively at mass scale."

I love this stuff. "We can be organizaed without an organization." 

Thanks to D. Weinberger for the link.