http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,20411-2400772,00.html
The Times October 13, 2006 + Post a Comment Times2 Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Charles Leadbetter From YouTube to Wikipedia, collective creativity and collaboration are replacing top-down management as a business model. Our correspondent believes the We-Think phenomenon will affect every area of our lives Google has just agreed to pay about £889 million for YouTube, a website that barely existed 18 months ago and does not turn a profit, yet attracts 100 million viewers a day. If ever there were proof that the next big thing is us, this is it. Google’s service is based on extracting insight from our collective intelligence: its software comes up with answers to your queries by ranking web pages by the number of links that people have made to them — each link is counted like another vote that the page is significant. Google’s software mines this collective intelligence. YouTube, meanwhile, started with two people trying to share some video footage of a dinner party online. It has created a way for pro- am video-makers to publish and share what they record on camera phones, webcams and digital cameras. As with Google, its ethos is democratic: people can vote on what they like. As a result the most unlikely videos — pensioners ranting about the state of the world, a man losing his cool on the subway — become smash hits. On YouTube, as yet, we do not watch stars and celebrities, but ourselves. Viewers are potential producers and participants. We are the action. Google and YouTube are not alone. Wikipedia, an online encyclopaedia created and maintained almost entirely by amateurs, attracts more visitors than The New York Times online, carries more content than almost all other encyclopaedias combined and threatens to dwarf the services offered by large publishing companies. Linux, a computer operating system started by a wispy Finnish computer science student and at first developed almost entirely by unpaid volunteers, is the main challenger to the operating system created by Microsoft, one of the world’s largest corporations. Most of the internet would be unthinkable without collaboratives, mostly made up of volunteers, who have created free, open-source software. If you send and receive e-mail you are probably doing so thanks to a free, open-source programme called Sendmail, which powers perhaps 80 per cent of the world’s mail servers. The system that keeps internet addresses in order depends on another open-source programme called BIND. If you saw The Lord of the Rings, you watched computer graphics made on machines that run Linux. A Google inquiry is answered by thousands of computers all running Linux. If you visit websites, you are likely to rely on an open-source programme called Apache, which is used on about 65 per cent of active websites. Apache was not conceived in the top-secret R&D lab of a big computer company. It started with a software engineer called Brian Behlendorf, who, in 1995, volunteered his server at Hotwired — one of the first webzines — for use as a shared resource by eight developers with whom he was working. They set up a public e-mail list which, on Day 1, attracted 40 other engineers. In three months there were 150 subscribers. By the end of the year, this loose collective released a working version of Apache that quickly came to dominate the market, overtaking offerings from mainstream companies. Welcome to the world of We-Think. We are developing new ways to innovate and be creative en masse. We can be organised without an organisation. People can combine ideas and skills without a hierarchy. The record industry has had its business model upended by hackers creating file-sharing systems that have as their common currency the MP3 file, an innovation given away by its creator, a publicly funded German computer scientist. The main alternative to the might of Wal-Mart is not another hypermarket chain but eBay, a trading system through which millions of participants buy and sell to strangers, setting their own prices, advertising their own products, doing their own deals and deciding how to ship their products. The most successful computer games, such as Sim City, Ultima Online and Everquest, outsell Hollywood films because they allow players to tamper with and change the action, creating their own characters and storylines. These player-developers then contribute their innovations, free, back to the larger community playing the game. The next wave of entertainment is entire immersive worlds — the likes of Neopets and Second Life — in which people can adopt a character, learn, trade, fight, make love and create the action together. More than 95 per cent of the content of Second Life — a world that has universities, stock exchanges, museums — is created by its inhabitants: the 800,000-plus players. More than 7,000 businesses make real profits by selling through Second Life. The guiding ethos of this new culture is participation. The point of the industrial-era economy was mass production for mass consumption — the formula created by Henry Ford. We were workers by day and consumers in the evenings or at weekends. In the world of We-Think the point is to be a player in the action, a voice in the conversation — not to consume but to participate. In the We-Think economy people don’t just want services and goods delivered to them. They also want tools so that they can take part and places in which to play, share, debate with others. Traditionally, workers can be instructed, organised in a division of labour. Participants will not be led and organised in this way: the dominant ethos of the We-Think economy is democratic and egalitarian. These vast communities of participation are led by antiheroic, slight leaders — the likes of Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia and Linus Torvalds of Linux. Such people are the antithesis of the charismatic, harddriving chief executive in the Jack Welch mould. These collaboratives change the way in which people come up with new ideas. Innovation and creativity were once elite activities undertaken by special people — writers, designers, architects, inventors — in special places — garrets, studies, laboratories. The ideas they dreamt up would flow down pipelines to passive consumers. Now innovation and creativity are becoming mass activities, dispersed across society. Largely self-organising collaborations can unravel the human genome, create a vast encyclopaedia and a complex computer operating system. This is innovation by the masses, not just for the masses. My book We-Think is an effort to understand this new culture; where these new ways of organising ourselves have come from and where they might lead. They started in the geeky swampland — in open-source software, blogging and computer gaming. But they are so powerful that increasingly they will become the mainstream by challenging traditional organisations to open up. They could change not just the ways in which the media, software and entertainment work but how we organise education, healthcare, cities and, indeed, the political system. We know that children spend 85 per cent of their time outside school, so what they learn through computer games and the internet is critical. Innovative approaches to virtual learning, such as the Notschool.net initiative to encourage children excluded from school to learn online, may be a sign of what is to come for mainstream education that seeks to be available at any time and anywhere — imagine a system organised along the lines of eBay or Wikipedia, with learners seeking out teachers and materials from a wide range of sources. If the computer games industry can get millions of children to see themselves as player-developers, how could we instil some of that culture of disciplined self-help and creativity into the education system? When children play computer games they feel part of the action; too often, at school they feel as if they are being “done to”. The Jubilee 2000 debt campaign, which changed the way we think about debt, development and trade, started with one campaigner working in a shed in South London in the mid-1990s. By 2000 it had a petition with 24 million signatures, had spawned a network of 69 national campaigns and mobilised hundreds of thousands of people in the UK to protest. At least $36 billion (£19.4 billion) of Third World debt has been written off as a result — no mean achievement for a campaign that was organised largely by Pro-Am campaigners, had little formal structure and few professional staff. That spirit of participation is starting to creep into formal politics. As Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, warned the Conservative Party conference last week, politicians had better get used to living in a much more transparent world, in which citizen journalists will nag away at their lies and half-truths far more insistently than the traditional journalistic insiders. At the start of the 21st century this should not be happening. The last decades of the 20th century bore witness to the triumph of the market and corporations. Co-operative and collaborative values were in retreat. In an increasingly materialistic and venal world, people do not do things for free: there has to be something in it for them. And if there is nothing in it for them, they have to be told — instructed what to do by managers. We are still told that to be organised we need an organisation. Yet the examples above are complex and highly organised activities in which no single organisation is in charge of all that goes on. We are told that for order to be maintained someone has to be in control. Yet these activities seem ordered precisely because no one seeks to be in control, so people have to exercise their sense of responsibility — adjusting to one another, sorting out disputes as they go. The order comes from within, not from the top. To get complex tasks done reliably we have assumed that we need a clear division of labour. Yet in these non-organisations people seem voluntarily to find their own niches and distribute themselves to work as and when it needs doing. Consumers, we are told, are happiest when they are treated like kings and offered the widest possible choice. Yet in these vast communal efforts the consumers willingly become workers, devoting some of their time, effort and imagination to developing products for one another. They do not want to be just passive recipients but players and participants — at least, some of them do, some of the time. They do not want just more choice but more say. We have come to expect that innovation comes from inventors and that every idea has a distinct moment of birth. Yet in these new endeavours innovation is the work of multiple authors and takes place all over, not just in specially designated zones. We-Think scrambles the logic of managerial capitalism. Consumers turn out to be producers. Demand breeds its own supply. Leisure becomes a form of work. You do not have to buy into alternative, hippyish, altruistic values to believe that We-Think organisations are significant. People do not turn to Wikipedia and Linux just because they sound good but because they get basic jobs done reliably, at low cost. If you are researching anything, Wikipedia is a good starting point. The irresistible force of collaborative mass innovation is about to meet the immovable object of entrenched corporate organisation. We- Think is about that coming conflict and what will emerge from it. Linux and open-source software against the power of Microsoft. Google and YouTube against the power of the industrial-era media giants. Wikipedia attempting to become the Red Cross for global information, possibly trumping CNN and the BBC. As I was researching and writing We-Think, it became evident that I could not write a book about collaborative creativity in a traditional way — which is why, with the support of my publishers at Profile, I am releasing the book in draft form before its physical publication, which is planned for summer 2007. Most of the first draft was made available online this week, with the final three or four chapters following over the next few weeks. I hope that by opening up the book to readers’ comments before it hits the bookshops, we can make it a better book. But the real point is to provoke a conversation about the emerging opportunities for us to organise ourselves in more collaborative, creative ways. Download, print and comment on We-Think at charlesleadbeater.net or wethinkthebook.net and join in. We-Think on the web Google: Ranks web pages according to the number of links made to them. YouTube: Allows users to upload and share videos. Wikipedia: A free encyclopaedia compiled and updated by its users. eBay: International auction site. A similar exchange, Freecycle, passes on furniture for free. Craigslist: Provides free classified ads. Amazon: Online retail site with message board-style reviews. These are also key to the success of sites such as Money Saving Expert and Mumsnet. MySpace: A social networking site. Similar sites are Bebo, Facebook and Piczo. Flickr: Photograph-sharing site. World of Warcraft: Online role-playing game. Seven million paying subscribers. Second Life Virtual alternative world. Del.icio.us: Social bookmarking site. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ TELECOM-CITIES Current searchable archives (Feb. 1, 2006 to present) at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ Old searchble archives at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/ -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
