Changing our world through Collaborative Creativity

Net-enabled collaboration has already changed the media, publishing and entertainment industries. In the words of keynote speaker Clay Shirky, “The rise of new forms of collaborative effort doesn't mean we enter some period of post-hierarchical paradise, but it does mean that the former institutional monopoly on large-scale action is eroding, because large groups of people, operating outside managerial structures, are creating enormously valuable resources, from Flickr and del.icio.us to Apache and Linux.”

That’s the crux of the argument of his book Here Comes Everybody. But if corporations and governments won’t merely wither away, they will become less important and, in ways, less powerful, argues Shirky, a consultant and New York University professor who specialises in the effects of Internet technologies.

Charles Leadbeater, a British innovation expert and government advisor, agrees. “Those with top-down control will fight to retain it,” he writes in his recent book We-Think. Chief among them will be communist China, as its civil society becomes more autonomous; software, entertainment and media companies, as people change the ways they use and pay (or don’t) for content; and managers and professionals, as underlings and customers get less deferential.

Shirky says, “The effect on traditional institutions, whether business, government, or nonprofits, will be to create an incentive to work with the crowd where ever such hybridisation can lead to a better outcome.”

All this could just be the next step in our evolution. In many ways, collaborative creativity works better than old hierarchical forms, both authors argue. As organisations get larger, they must devote exponentially more resources to keeping themselves organised, as Shirky points out. Leadbeater argues in his book that collective creativity – or ‘We-Think’ – “is the most effective way to organise mass innovation at scale.”

And innovate it does. The cross-pollination we see in diverse groups favours problem-solving, Leadbeater argues, as a group sees from many angles and is therefore less likely to get stuck. Collaborating groups have made scientific achievements that wouldn’t have been possible under a hierarchical model. And the new tools only make it easier for such groups to come together.

“The Net is best suited for what Ron Burt calls ‘the social origin of good ideas’,” Shirky says, “which is to say ideas that benefit from cross-fertilization coming from many contributors. Open source software and community-produced reference materials are two obvious classes of work that couldn't exist at their current scale without the Net.”

Collaborative creativity has its limits, though. While it “may liberate us from the control of a cultural elite,” Leadbeater writes, it “might also rob us of high-quality journalism, literature, film and music, as the institutions that train and employ professionals find their economic foundations eaten away.” A million amateur blogs, for instance, will never replace “well-trained and -funded investigative journalism that makes politicians quake, probing the depths of scandals the powerful want to keep quiet.”

Certain creative arts also suffer under this model, Shirky warns. “Net groups are bad at whatever creative work groups are bad at in general. Countless people have launched various versions of the ‘Wiki novel'. These are invariably terrible, and they are terrible precisely because the novel as a form has developed around the idea of an individual voice.”

In other areas, though, human ingenuity could flower. “We-Think might come of age in the fight against global warming, because finding alternative ways to generate energy, use resources and cope with rising sea levels will require collective innovation on an immense scale,” Leadbeater writes. Collaborative creativity, he predicts, “will really make a difference when we use it to creatively tackle major shared challenges: to spread democracy and learning, to improve health and quality of life, to tackle climate change and the threat of extremism.”

Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater will both contribute a keynote presentation speak at the PICNIC conference. On Wednesday 24 September, Charles Leadbeater will open the conference, and will engage in a discussion with Clay Shirky. On 25 September, Clay Shirky, will present his views.