Interview Leadbeater.
Reporter's Notebook
We need someone to interview Charles Leadbeater. If you want the assignment, you need to be very well versed on his ideas, and you need to be able to discuss these ideas with him as they pertain to his own consulting work and larger trends and developments in networked communication and creativity. The person who speaks with Leadbeater should also write up the interview as a Q&A, with an intro that acquaints the reader with Leadbeater’s ideas, work, and influence.
If you are interested in this assignment, please tell us why you're a good candidate below. You'll hear back from us as soon as we're ready to set up the interview. The story may change depending on what the crowd shares in the meantime. We'll keep you in the loop.
Background
Charles Leadbeater, Writer on the 'Activist Amateur'
Leadbeater has developed the idea of the “activist amateur,” among other important concepts. He’s a prolific and influential writer and consultant.
His current project is a book called “We-think,” which he describes on his Web site as “the power of mass creativity, which charts the rise of mass, participative approaches to innovation from science and open source software, to computer games and political campaigning.”
Here’s some more about Leadbeater, excerpted from a much longer biography:
Charles has worked extensively as a senior adviser to the governments over the past decade, advising the 10 Downing St policy unit, the Department for Trade and Industry and the European Commission on the rise of the knowledge driven economy and the Internet, as well as the government of Shanghai. He is an advisor to the Department for Education's Innovation Unit on future strategies for more networked and personalised approaches to learning and education.
A visiting senior fellow at the British National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts, he is also a longstanding senior research associate with the influential London think-tank Demos and a visiting fellow at Oxford University's Said Business School.
Charles spent ten years working for the Financial Times where he was Labour Editor, Industrial Editor and Tokyo Bureau Chief before becoming the paper's Features Editor. In 1994 he moved to the Independent as assistant editor in charge of features and became an independent author and advisor in 1996.
The New York Times has reported on his pro-am revolution.
Filed Reporting
Innovation as Collaborative Activity
Mass creativity when the crowd sources itself
Lilly Evans interviews Charles Leadbeater.
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Charles Leadbeater is a globe-trotting consultant, futurologist, journalist, and author. His latest work, We-think, examines the phenomenon of mass creativity and is hosted in draft form on Wikia. Leadbeater co-authored "The Pro-Am Revolution" in 2004 and has reported on the expansion of open technology and its impact on society since the 1980s. Leadbeater participated in this interview via email from Portland, Oregon.
Lilly Evans: Why did you get interested and involved in crowdsourcing?
Charles Leadbeater: I’ve been interested in innovation for a long time. In the past four or five years I’ve got increasingly interested in innovation as a collaborative, social, and potentially mass activity, getting away from seeing it as something only done by special people in special places.
Q: What has been problematic about crowdsourcing?
A: There are lots of issues about it: when it works and when not. Collective intelligence is not always possible or better. Crowds can be wise or angry mobs and much in between.
The particular issue with crowdsourcing I think is the “sourcing” idea. It draws from outsourcing, which implies the crowd is being sourced by an organization for a better solution. That presents it as an organizational or process innovation which overlaps with Henry Chesbrough’s work on open innovation: widening the funnel drawing ideas into a company. But as well as open innovation into a company there is open innovation out, where a group of people create a core together upon which a larger collective builds. I think this is less amenable to the crowdsourcing metaphor because there may well be no formal organization doing the sourcing, the crowd is sourcing itself.
Q: Does crowdsourcing involve more support and management than a traditional environment would? Or less?
A: It rarely works as a free-for-all. It requires some core norms and rules of behavior, but not many. It does require leadership but of a particular, open, conversational kind. It thrives on decentralized cooperation and people taking responsibility for working together. So it needs a leadership that makes the conditions for that possible.
Q: What characteristics of a crowdsourced endeavor make it more or less likely to succeed?
A: Crowds might combine more diverse points of view, tools, knowledge, making innovation and problem solving more likely. Crowds sometimes find it difficult to agree on fundamental goals so cannot collaborate or just as bad they become mobs with no room for critical thought and dissent.
Q: Do you see any crowdsourcing "low-hanging fruit" that has not yet been exploited, and if so, what?
A: There is a huge growth in what might call Pop Idol models: companies trying to draw on a wider talent base but to feed an essential unchanged corporate process. There is much potential for collective intelligence in education, health, politics, news and media, cultural production. We’ve only just begun.
Q: You have run crowdsourcing project with We-think. What did you do that worked well?
A: It is still in process so its early to say but:
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-- I got a lot of encouragement from a lot of people
-- I got some great ideas and links to people doing related work
-- it got the idea to a wider audience/conversation globally much faster
-- I got some specific criticisms/questions/comments that were very helpful.
Q: What did you do that didn't work so well?
A: But on the flip side:
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-- people do not necessarily want to help me write a book, they want to contribute to something that matters for them, motivation is critical
-- professional editors still matter a lot, they have provided the most searching criticisms
-- it takes a lot of time to respond to the multiple interactions/questions.
Edited by Andy Sternberg.
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