Charlie Leadbeater: Open source principles can change our Lives

What follows is Charlies first post to OpenBusiness. He explains the history of his new book and brings interesting inisghts to debate. He thinks that “open source principles ” – shared, distributed, co-created, peer to peer, largely self-governing” can be applied beyond software and music to the way we organise education and health, cities and political systems. Join the debate and read his insightful post (though its more article-length).

Where We-Think Came From

To be honest I did not set out to write this book at all. What follows is as honest an account I can give, though by no means complete, of how I came to write this book. It’s as story littered with accidents, in which everything I have done has lent heavily on the contributions of other people.

The title We-think came from my sister in law during a summer holiday in France last year. Descartes marked a huge inward turn in our thinking when he announced “I think, there for I am.” It seems to me that this generation’s motto should be “We-think, therefore we are.” (I can’t tell you how many titles this book has had in its drafting. I will post a list of them at the end of the week and if anyone can do any better I’d be very grateful…)
From Simplicity to Open Source

Originally I was thinking of writing a book about simplicity. Everything seems so complex, what most people want is some simplicity. And ironically complex systems are able to self-organise themselves with the help of a few simple codes and norms. This is area well trawled by good books such as Steven Johnson’s Emergence so I steered towards what I spend most of my time talking about, which is innovation.

After a conference called Beyond the Backlash, in 2002, I had read Ikka Tuomi’s excellent Networks of Innovation which argues for a more collaborative account of innovation. Innovation rarely starts with a moment of birth when a single individual has a flash of insight. Most often innovation is highly cumulative and collaborative. It comes from many authors combining their ideas over a long period.

Tuomi’s insights seemed to me to add something to Johnson’s: a picture of innovation emerging, en mass, from a host of collaborative efforts. Other research and reading added to the picture. Henry Chesbrough, a Harvard academic, wrote a good book called Open Innovation which is about how companies are adopting more networked approaches to innovation, drawing on inspiration outside the company. Innovation increasingly emerges from networks rather than R & D labs.

That’s underlined by Eric von Hippel who had already alerted us that many innovations start with lead users. In Democratising Innovation he took that thinking a stage further, arguing that the likes of open source innovation could make innovation a mass, democratic activity rather than one for just a technocratic elite. John Suroweicki, in the dazzling The Wisdom of Crowds underlined amplified that, showing that large groups of people, when organised in the right way, tended to come up with answers better than small groups of experts.

The question of how crowds could organise themselves to be creative and intelligent was partly answered, it seemed to me, by Steven Weber’s The Success of Open Source, in which he unpicked the way open source collaboratives govern themselves and make decisions, motivate and reward participants. Weber’s book helped to show how Suroweicki’s crowds could become self-organised and structured. Weber points to a future in which one of the critical issues will be governing the relationship between companies and communities, proprietary and common resources.

Into that mix came The Future of Competition by CK Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy which argues that most value is created through interaction between producers and consumers, rather than down a value chain, transferring value to the consumer. Co-creation provided a model of how value gets created in these collaboratives, such as computer games communities, through the flows and interactions within communities. When you try to draw a collaborative effort like Wikipedia is does not look like a value chain but more – I think – like a bird’s nest.

All of that pointed to the new ways we could self-organise ourselves in creative endeavours, at mass scale, with the help of ubiquitous communications and computing power, evidenced in their different ways by the growth of social networking, citizen journalism and multi player computer games. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks laid out the significance of the growth of low cost, social media, with a magisterial sweep.

But it also seemed to me that three or four other things needed to be thrown into the mix.

First some very old ideas are being recuperated by these new technologies. These collaboratives seem to be ahead of the times by being slightly behind them. They are a peculiar mixture of the pre and the post-industrial. There is nothing new in folk culture, commons based production, modular design, mutual forms of ownership. These are all pre-industrial ideas being brought back to life.

Second, it seemed to me we needed to take up Weber’s challenge at the end of The Success of Open Source. Are these models just confined to the new media industries of entertainment and software or could they be applied more generally? My hunch was that even if open source models could not be applied to the letter the open source metaphor – shared, distributed, co-created, peer to peer, largely self-governing – could. So I have set out to explore how these models will not just change software and music but how we organise education and health, cities and political systems.

Third, underlying a lot of these activities it seemed to me was an ethic of participation. People want to be participants, at least most people do some of the time, rather than being mere consumers, choosing in the mall, waiting at the check out, flicking the remote control. Open source speaks to this ethic of participation: be a player not just a spectator. That was a theme I explored with Paul Miller in my Demos pamphlet The Pro Am Revolution. If we modelled organisations not around consumption as the end point but to maxmise creative participation what would they look like? What if knowledge and power flowed out of the hands of professionals and priesthoods into the hands of committed, sociable and inquisitive amateurs? It seems to be its time to resuscitate the idea of amateurism: doing something because you love doing it not just because of status or monetary rewards.

Finally I thought there was a connection between all this and social entrepreneurship especially in the developing world, where social entrepreneurs cannot afford top down, professional solutions. Listening to Bunker Roy the founder of India’s Barefoot College at the Skoll World Forum for Social Entrepreneurs in March 2006 I realised his barefoot model – train local people to teach one another to help themselves – was also at the heart of a lot of open source, blogging, computer games and the like. For a while the book was called Go Barefoot. Social entrepreneurs often lead community campaigns that are mass, self-organising social innovation in action.

We-Think is an attempt to tie all those threads together and cast them out as well, to see how mass creativity might change the way we think about more established kinds of organisation. I also want to cast it forward. As I was writing the book the social networking craze and Web2.0 deluged the media. Social networking and social media seems to have become the new religion. I think it has huge power and potential to deepen democracy, extend freedom and enable greater equality. But I am interested in who the new atheists will be, what the limits and downsides of social media might be, as well as how it could be co-opted by commercial interests.

Why to Make the Book “OS”

Half way through writing the book I realised it was going to be very odd to write a book about collaborative creativity, enabled by new media, in a traditional way. I needed to apply the thinking in the book to its own writing. So that is why – with the support of my publishers I have decided to open it up for people to download in draft, comment on and add to. But I will say a little more about why I’ve done that and how this kind of approach could change the way we think of what a book is in my next post late tomorrow afternoon.

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