The Magic Balance: Collaboration and Creativity

Thanks in part to the explosion of Web 2.0 models of social networking, a whole range of fields has received a shot in the arm: knowledge management, group dynamics, virtual teaming, emergent intelligence, collaborative work, customer-centric innovation, and global creativity, to name a few.

The magic balance, however, is creating social and professional networks which collaborate in such a way that the outcome is neither unusably chaotic nor bandly conformative.

And the quest for that formula is the holy grail for entire communities of scientists, artistes, businessmen, social activists, and government policymakers. A whole publishing industry also seems to have emerged around this issue.

Witness the popularity of recent titles and authors, such as “Who's Your City? How the Creative Economy Is Making Where to Live the Most Important Decision of Your Life,” by Richard Florida, “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom,” by Yochai Benkler, “The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations,” by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom, “Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing,” by Adam Greenfield, “Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming,” by Paul Hawken, and “Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd Is Driving the Future of Business,” by Jeff Howe.

Authors of two popular books on the topic were at the PICNIC conference in Amsterdam this week: Charles Leadbeater, author of “We-think: The Power of Mass Creativity,” and Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.”

Leadbeater and Shirky introduced interesting metaphors to understand the power of creative social networks. Leadbeater spoke of how we are moving away from a model of “boulders on the beach,” to one of “pebbles on the beach.” Shirky said the utility of social network sites and collaborative knowledge platforms like Wikipedia is like the pizza slice model: there is always someone who appreciates at least a slice of knowledge on any topic.

The key to finding the success formula in such communities, according to Leadbeater, is diversity, modular design, a shared sense of person, and ways for the community to rate, rank and create objects. He cited Wikipedia’s Jim Wales, who said the site owes its successful functioning to one part each of anarchy, democracy, meritocracy, aristocracy and monarchy.

Other good examples of such purposeful creative collaboration are the Linux kernel for open source code, and NanoHub for exchange of simulations on nanotechnology.

Companies have to move away from the model of “doing things for and to” employees to one of doing things “with and by” them. Shirky said. Very few big corporations have embraced this model: a good example is IBM’s funding of Linux initiatives in order to increase the value to the whole ecosystem rather than appropriation of value from the individual developer.

Part of the challenge in understanding the activity of social networks can be overcome by a range of emerging visualisation tools and projects.

Digital artist Aaron Koblin showed some fascinating examples of such visualisation, such as the New York Talk Exchange (senseable.mit.edu/nyte/, mapping phone and email patterns), TheSheepMarket.com, and TenThousandCents.com.

More on such tools, projects and case studies tomorrow!