New book being released…
I just read the first chapter of Charles Leadbeater’s new (upcoming book) over the weekend.
It’s to be called “We Think: why mass creativity is the next big thing.”
FANTASTIC.
For anyone interested in UGC, SN, and the rise of consumer empowerment do check it out. I wanted to include an excerpt here, but it’s so good I had trouble finding a suitable bit; here is one of my fav bits….
The Self Assembling Bird’s Nest
Larry Sanger and Jimmy Wales had a problem. The free online encyclopedia they had set up – Nupedia – was growing at snails pace. Nupedia relied on voluntary contributions but had such an elaborate system for peer review that only highly qualified contributors could get their material accepted. After several months only a few articles had made it through the process. On January 2, 2001 Sanger had dinner with a computer programmer Ben Kovitz who explained a new development in websites called Wikis which he thought might breathe new life into Nupedia. Wikis are websites that can be edited by any user, using nothing more powerful than a standard web browser.
They allow people to dip into a text, contribute to it, leave their mark and exit. The text then grows as a collective creation, and collaborative piece of work, being edited by several hands. Sanger immediately saw the potential for using a wiki to rescue Nupedia and he quickly persuaded Wales to set up a wiki version of the encyclopaedia. The reviewers and editors on Nupedia did not like the idea. In common with professionals in many other walks of life, they felt under threat and resisted. They did not want their work to be associated with something as low-brow as a wiki, something that anyone could edit. There was, they complained, no guarantee of quality. So Wikipedia was launched with is own domain name on January 15th 2001.A month later it already had 1,000 articles and reached 10,000 by September. By March 2005 the English Wiki had more than 500,000 articles, many of them based on multiple contributions. In its first four years Wikipedia attracted 2m entries, in 105 languages. Nupedia meanwhile was closed down and only ever attracted 24 entries.
Wikipedia is a dizzying collaborative creation. Anyone can edit it, take away the information and use it. There are no editors, fact checkers or proof-readers, at least not ones that are paid. An encyclopedia is an august body of knowledge, a bit like a monument, compiled by experts through an editorial process few know about and at great expense. Wikipedia is a constantly evolving account of a huge range of things, continuously updated and mainly compiled by a breed of committed amateurs, through a process which seems completely transparent. The Encyclopedia Britannica has 44m words of text. Wikipedia already has 250m.Quantity, of course, does not necessarily equate with quality. It is not Wikipedia’s aim to replace encyclopedias or to supplant all forms of expert knowledge. Many critics argue Wikipedia’s democratic approach gives it a populist edge: the contributions on popular culture such as Coronation Street or Barbie dolls are sometimes far longer than those on art or politics. Wikipedia has had its problems. Some small sections of the site – the section on President George Bush and the war in Iraq - had to be closed down because contributions to them became a kind of political warfare. The site has suffered some vandalism, inaccuracies and some people have tampered with entries to self-promote themselves or attack others. It is far from perfect. Yet on the whole Wikipedia is an easy to use, well organized, starting point for research on many subjects. Attempts to doctor it will be found out, probably more easily than reporters on the New York Times making up quotes from invented interviewees. It is not the final story on that subject but often a good place to start. And it invites you to contribute because you are giving something back to the community you have drawn from.
What is remarkable is how Wikipedia manages to make it all work. It is as much a social innovation as a technological one. Wikipedia recruited its first full time employee in January 2005. Its annual running costs are less than $100,000.Wales, a former options trader, bankrolled it in its first four years to a tune of about $300,000, a pittance compared to the money that venture capitalists poured into the Internet during the dot.com boom. One secret of Wikipedia’s success is that it is very easy to use: costs of entry are virtually zero. Anyone can take part; you do not have to show your credentials at the door. (Imagine a company that allowed people to come to work for it first and only asked questions about their credentials, once they had seen the quality of their work.) But because there are so many people swarming over the site you had better be reasonably sure that what you are going to add is accurate, because not then other people will correct it.
Charles’ website is here: http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/home.aspx
Download the draft of the first few chapters here: http://www.charlesleadbeater.net/cms/site/docs/Charles%201-5%20draft.pdf
Check out the We Think Wiki site here: http://wethink.wikia.com/wiki/We-think:About