We-think: what's it about?

All comments will be acknowledged in the book as published in 2007, either in the text, in footnotes or in the acknowledgements section.

The basic argument is very simple. Most creativity is collaborative. It combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. The opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding the whole time. The number of people who could be participants in these creative conversations is going up largely thanks to the communications technologies that now give voice to many more people and make it easier for them to connect. As a result we are developing new ways to be innovative and creative at mass scale. We can be organised without having an organisation. People can combine their ideas and skills without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities. Many of the ingredients of these forms of self-organised creative collaboration are not new - peer review for example has been around a long time in academia. But what is striking about Wikipedia, Linux, Second Life, Youtube and many more is the way they take familiar ingredients and combine them to allow people to collaborate creatively at mass scale.

The guiding ethos of this new culture and forms of organisation is participation. The point of the industrial era economy, was mass production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford. In the world of We-think, the point is to take part, to be a player in the action, to have a voice in the conversation. And in a participation economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but tools so they can take part and places in which they can play, share, debate with others. Workers could be instructed, organised in a division of labour. Participants will not be lead and organised in this way.

The people who take part in these collaboratives are neither workers nor consumers. They are participants and contributors. If the 20th century marked the rise of mass consumerism, one feature of the 21st century will be the rise of the mass participation economy: innovation by the masses not for the masses. Innovation and creativity have been elite activities, undertaken by special people - writers, designers, architects, inventors - in special places - garrets, studies, laboratories. Now innovation and creativity are becoming mass activities, dispersed across society. 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, as most radical and disruptive innovation do, in the margins, in open source, blogging and gaming. But they will increasingly become the mainstream by challenging traditional, hierarchical, top down and closed organisations to open up. They could change not just the way that the media, software and entertainment works but also the way we organise education, health care, cities and indeed the political system.

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