Written on September 24, 2008 – 2:53 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur
The first keynote at PICNIC today was by Charles Leadbeater who repeated his usual ‘Power to the People’ speech and gave us a preview of his upcoming book. Ernst-Jan wrote an excellent article just minutes ago about his story.
Leadbeater is a great storyteller who knows how to keep 1000 people in a room quiet which is impressive because one of the things he promotes is user intervention. One of the themes he spoke about was the “Doing to me VS working WITH me”. We are all part of the generation that get things done to them by big corporations and government. Leadbeater spoke about his education where ‘Learning was being done TOO me’ and a visit to a hospital where the doctor will tell you he is working ‘for you’ but everything he does feels like it is being done ‘against me’. Now we are entering a new world where we, the consumer, patient, worker, are part of all processes and get to work WITH people who used to be solely in charge. The internet is the big enabler in this, of course.
After his inspiring speech Clay Shirky entered the stage to ask Leadbeater a few questions. His first provocative question was ‘Where WON’T this work?’. Leadbeater gave a few examples of which one was ‘You wouldn’t want your hernia operated on by someone who read about the procedure on the Internet’. Good point.
At one point Clay opined that the formula for influencing crowd controlled systems were too simple. Shirky:
“Digg is supposed to be a user controlled medium. But I know that if I post an article titled “the 7 Hottest Women in Science Fiction” it will reach the front page of Digg in no time at all just because the title has a number in it, has the promise of NSFW images and ‘Science Fiction’ in the title. There is only the impression of democracy…”
Lets find out if Clay Shirky is right…
Oh, and here is the undisputed #1:
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Written on September 24, 2008 – 2:39 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Charles Leadbeater, author and former adviser to Tony Blair, opened the Picnic conference in Amsterdam today with a keynote about collaborative creativity. He started with a statement about collaboration: “it not just applies to high tech, new media, and culture, but also to social challenges - like the environment. Collaborative action is not just about new things, but about very broad challenges. We’ll have to bring different people together”.
He wrote the book “We Think” about this, but don’t worry, you won’t have to buy it. According to Leadbeater, several people told him a four-minute YouTube video gives a good idea of his book.
When showing this video to his 13-year old, the young fella patted him on the back and left after two minutes. 92,000 other people did like the video though and left over 300 comments. “It’s the beginning of a conversation”, said Leadbeater.
He then showed a video that his kid probably liked better: a teenager playing along on his electric guitar with a synthesized version of Bach’s Air. Leadbeater: “49 milion people around the globe spend five minutes of their lives on watching this kid playing his guitar. Just image he would have told the BBC controller of entertainment whether she wanted to show this five-minute clip. (..) Get out of here, would have been the definite answer. Thanks to the web this boy didn’t have to go through all that. It’s the new world.”
Leadbeater talked about the changed media environment. How the old media world existed of a few major players and the millions of smaller parties that have now popped up. “The challenge is to connect them and try to make something more out of it than just bits”. This is of the utmost importance, because creativity mostly flourishes because of collaborative action. “It’s a myth that creativity always comes from a single person with a brilliant insight. Most creative ideas come from people blending and mixing things”, said Leadbeater.
Yet not all collaboration leads to creativity. Sometimes there’s too much consensus (boring) or too much chaos (leads to nothing). To get us started, Leadbeater shared five key conditions for stimulating creativity through collaborative action.
- Diversity is king, participants need to think differently and have different knowledge.
- Give people ways to contribute. They need really simple ways to add their piece of information.
- Connect people with each other by using the most suitable technology
- The most important one: participants must have a shared sense of purpose and an individual sense of pay-off. Use a mascot or something.
- Communities need to have some element of structure to make decisions.
[Photo credit: Jaap Stronks]
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