There's a lot of recent buzz about creative community and collaboration. Jamais recently posted the Collaboration Manifesto, and Andy Carvin recently wrote about Richard Florida's speech which opened the University Continuing Education Association conference.
..."My father worked for the same company in Pittsburgh from age 11 to age 65," Florida said. "Today the average worker changes jobs every three years - and if you're 30 or younger, you change jobs after less than one year." Because of this constant career churn, people want to be where there is economic opportunity built around innovation and skills - creative communities. Today's information economy workers want to move to a place with "a thick labor force" - a place with energy and creative vibrancy....
-- Richard Florida: Fostering Creative Communities [Andy Carvin]
What I find most interesting about all this discussion is that there's a sense of something ripe in the air. We find more and more people discussing Creativity, Community, Freedom and Collaboration in the same sentences. From Lawrence Lessig's book Free Culture, which has had many collaborative remixes, to people on mailing lists, to mainstream media. But what does it all mean?
Perhaps it means that these concepts have been lurking in disjointed communities; silent areas of brooding creativity that have reached critical mass and are now mature enough to interact. It's obvious that Lessig's latest book helped tie much of this together in allowing people of different communities to collaborate.
But there's something fundamental lacking in all of this discussion.
The Internet.
The Internet makes alot of creative collaboration possible - in the last project I participated in (a remix of Lessig's book), I worked with a someone in Candada (who is actually from Europe!), and someone in the United States. I'm here in Trinidad and Tobago. Thus, geography - which has traditionally limited collaboration efforts. People congregated first where there was food, water and shelter. Later they congregated where there was transportation (ports, train stations, etc.). Yet we have transcended that, though not completely.
Richard Florida made the case of Silicon Valley, which is not unfamiliar to me. Steve Traugott mentioned something similar at the FLOS Caribbean conference (2003) - even with failed projects, the people involved are still in Silicon Valley. The 'grey matter' does not leave.
Enter the internet. As long as one has a connection to the internet, one can move anywhere in the world and be a part of Creative Collaboration, a part of Creative Culture, a part of Free Culture. Such collaboration is not new; much of the software that makes the internet possible (and thus you reading this) was developed collaboratively - through Free Software and Open Source (combined, FOSS) projects.
The WorldChanging weblog itself is a symbol of this collaboration. San Francisco (near Silicon Valley, strangely), Stockholm, Toronto, New York City, London, Austin and Trinidad and Tobago. Amazing.
Collaboration across the world is catching on; the passion of creativity burns across the geographic fields via wires and wireless transmission. Participation is easier; finding projects that interest people are easier. And they are beginning to work together in ways that are simply amazing. Silently, and until lately unannounced, the World is becoming a melting pot of ideas of groups across the world.
Hungrily, we ask for more.
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