PICNIC: We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity

Let down badly by BMI, we have only just arrived, later than scheduled. But we’re soon over to PICNIC courtesy of Ramon the manic cab driver, a relatively painless registration, and then straight into today’s keynote: Charles Leadbetter on ‘How to sell books and secure your place on the lecture - ‘ No, that’s wrong. It’s called ‘We Think: The Power of Mass Creativity’ - We-Think being Charles Leadbetter’s book. And to be fair, Mr Leadbeater’s banging his we-think drum calmly and methodically: it’s all about collaboration.

Collaboration works and sometimes appears to work spontaneously in our new connected age, but don’t mistake this for anarchy. Collaboration has an anatomy and a structure and we can learn and  improve the new collaboration by studying, modelling and improving these.

It all makes sense but he’s no ball of fire.

The  problem is, this is no longer news. Everyone’s either read the book or the review, and everyone’s doing it, one way or another. And it’s a bit dull: The Journal of Ribonucleic Acid has just been invoked unless my ears are playing me false.

Scientists start with datasets… yes, we know, or maybe we only think we know)… Suddenly - following the obligatory ‘How many people here are satisfied by the results they get from Google?’ involve-the-crowd (collaborate with us, you fool!) question (nobody responds) - a personal anecdote: Charles Leadbeater felt like dancing when he first saw Google. Then it’s back to datasets.

From data, the scientists model it to test hypotheses. To get it peer reviewed they also need to share the software which tests the models. So the Open Source practice kicks in. And because of Open Source approach, more people get involved, which ups the pace, and so experiments results tend to be published daily, not just at the end of the test. Which drives further ongoing collaborative involvement for interested parties. True, true… The Genome Project, yes.

CL now invokes The Levellers as a collaborative movement that stopped, or failed. And then asks us a Big Question. His Big Question is,

“Are we going to screw it up?” Sage. Gnomic, almost. We don’t know. We say nothing.

He’s in the home straight now: name drop: I spent some time with Tim Berners-Lee, who is like Bill Gates, who CL also knows, they’re like twins apparently… Anyway, he asked TIm,

‘Are we asking too much of the Internet?’

TIm replied, ‘The danger is that we’ll ask too little.’

“I’ll leave it there.” <Applause>