re:publica special – Collaborative Creativity

The past few days, Berlin has been THE hotspot for geeks, twitter addicts, data privacy activists and other inhabitants of the vast social space that is the internet. The annual conference on media, culture politics and the internet re:publica just went into its third round and is about to close today, after three days of presentations, panels and parties.

republica

Since the venue of this conference isn’t far from our office, I managed to sneak out to catch some of the talks. From the jovoto perspective, one was particularly interesting: Collaborative Creativity and the Test of Time, by Rishab Ayer Ghosh. Ghosh is a key player in the open source movement and currently senior researcher at the United Nations University in Maastricht, where he leads, among other projects, the Collaborative Creativity Group.

Ghosh clearly propagates the idea of the network as a source for innovation.

He started the talk with an example of collaborative creativity for which he dove way into the technological past: steam engines.

Watt’s version of the steam engine was patented in 1765 and the patent did not allow anyone to make improvements or changes to the design. The real technological breakthrough which eventually led to the industrial revolution came about only after a paper called the Lean’s Reported began publishing blueprints in 1811. Competition among engineers led to a skyrocketing of innovation.This case seems to prove the power of decentralized, collaborative processes to yield innovation.

To explain this phenomenon in economic terms, Ghosh has come up with the ‘cooking pot market’. In this concept, products, code, or ideas, aren’t traded but instead all thrown into a collective cooking pot. So rather than winding up with just one product, you end up with a stew for everyone – which is potentially much yummier than just eating plain fish or potato. A simple yet compelling analogy.

With digital goods its not even a problem to divide the stew. Everyone gets their own exact copy of the whole pot – so in the end everyone has the feeling they got out more than they put in and everyone’s happy.

There really seems to be no downside to collaborative creativity. in the end, society benefits from an increase in innovation.

Relating this to our little platform – isn’t jovoto a cooking pot for ideas? Each contributor throws in their idea and gets a copy of the whole pot: in this case, a pot of ideas. Ideally, these ideas are now there for everyone to work with, a common good from which to draw inspiration and produce new, improved ideas. (Strong emphasis on ‘new’ and ‘improved’ here) If the open source coders can do it, we can do it too!