An enduring myth of creativity is that of the lone genius, toiling away in a garage or laboratory or workshop, unknown and misunderstood (and possibly crazy – but that’s a myth for another day). In fact, most creative achievements come about through collaboration: people working together. Thomas Edison didn’t do it alone, and neither does James Dyson (according to dyson.com, Dyson Inc. currently employs 350 engineers).
What does collaboration mean in the age of the Internet? One thing it means: we have the ability to collaborate across distances like never before.
To help me better understand this, I recently attended a talk on social media at ISPI Charlotte by Kevin Jones, Social Strategist (yes, that’s a job title) for NASA, and president of Engaged Learning. Among the useful things he discussed are the forms of social media; I will summarize his definitions here.
- Web 1.0: One shares knowledge/opinions/expertise with everyone (e.g., most of the web)
- Web 1.5: Many share our knowledge/opinions/expertise with everyone (e.g., media web sites, content management systems such as SharePoint, content aggregators).
- Web 2.0: All share with everyone (e.g., YouTube)
- Social Media: We collaborate with everyone (e.g., wikis, GoogleDocs)
- Social Networking: We connect with everyone (e.g., Linkedin)
In the first three Web x.x conceptions, the focus is on the content: a one-way push, or a two-way share, but with an emphasis on the content itself. In the two forms of social collaboration, the focus is on the people – and that, Jones said, changes everything.
There are many efforts to harness the web (or, as we might soon call it, “the cloud”) for collaborative creativity, most in the “crowdsourcing” arena. Crowdsourcing essentially puts out a call for many voices, first to solicit ideas, then to judge ideas. In my opinion, this is a limited form of collaboration, more akin to voting than governing. As has been noted many times in this space, ideas are not creative per se, and creativity is not simply allowing the best idea to come to the top. Creativity is the hard work of forging a solution from new ideas. Voting for the best idea may work for a t-shirt design or an ad slogan, but not for truly creative solutions to complex problems.
The web future I am interested in has tools for collaborative creativity and problem solving, where people can do the hard work of creativity from wherever they are. There are some out there that can help, such as Google Docs, which allow multiple people to edit a document at the same time; web meeting applications such as WebEx, GoToMeeting, and Skype (sort of, eventually); and others.
Right now, the applications I have tried provide a platform without structure specific to creative collaboration. What else is out there? What have you tried?