Foreign Policy: Your new book, We-Think, argues that the Web enables a new form of creative collaboration. How does it work?

Charles Leadbeater: The cases that I have mainly looked at—open-source projects, Wikipedia, some games, scientific collaborations, collaborative news gathering—all seem to have the same basic ingredients. First, a core group establishes a core to the project, which is promising but unfinished. That attracts a larger group of contributors who must want to contribute, have the means to do so and receive some pay back for their efforts, usually just in terms of recognition from the community. To make that possible, two other things must fall into place. People have to be able to connect with one another and form groups to share ideas and information. And they have to be able to make decisions about what is good and what is bad. They have to be able to collaborate. If all those conditions are met, then the group, clan, tribe, or community has the opportunity to be creative, at scale and en masse in a way that was not easily possible before [the Web], and usually even when it was, it took many years.

FP: Why did you decide to undertake this project?

CL: I was primarily interested in the changing nature of innovation, how innovation was becoming more collaborative and interactive. That led me to look at how the Web was changing our options to allow us to organize ourselves in new ways.

FP: How is We-Think different from the way that people are already using the Web?

CL: We-Think is a development of ideas that have been around a long time, from at least the 1960s—time-sharing computing, open source and more latter-day applications known as Web 2.0. In many ways, it is a realization of the early ambitions people like Tim Berners-Lee had for the Web to be a space for collaboration rather than just publishing.

FP: What are the best examples of We-Think in action?

CL: Large-scale, collaborative open-source software projects; Wikipedia; some aspects of mass online computer games like World of Warcraft; highly collaborative scientific projects such as the International Polar Year. Anything that involves the conscious collaboration of a mass of independent people to solve a puzzle or create a piece of knowledge.

FP: In your book, you mention several examples of the potential for We-Think in the developing world. Do you really think this new form of collaboration will help cure poverty?

CL: I don't think it can cure poverty, and we should not claim too much for the Web. But information and knowledge and innovation are key inputs into health, medicine, and food production. So if we can use the Web to organize and make available knowledge in new ways, then it should help us address some of these issues. Traditional commercial approaches to innovation mean that innovation goes where the money is. Open-source, wiki approaches might mean more knowledge can flow to issues of the poor.

FP: At its root, isn’t We-Think a luxury of those who already have access to electricity, running water, medicine, etc.?

CL: No. Look at Amartya Sen’s work. He argues democracy is vital to development. Well, if the Web is one way for people to hold authoritarian regimes to account, then the Web should be good for development [as well]. Many of the most interesting and inspiring examples of We-Think will come from the developing world, societies that still have traditions of collective endeavor [even though they] do not have big, industrial hierarchies. The spirit of We-Think is alive in great social enterprises in the developing world like Grameen Bank and the Barefoot College. Read the Grameen Bank’s mission statement and then read the same thing from Google and Craigslist, and you find some uncanny similarities.

FP: During the writing process of your book, you posted your draft online, allowing readers to comment and critique your ideas. Wasn’t that an impediment to your own writing process? Do you really foresee other authors taking part in similar experiments in the future?

CL: I laugh when I see documents that say, “Draft: Not for circulation.” I want to write, “Draft: Please circulate as far and as wide as possible.” The whole point of a draft is that it is unfinished; it needs improvement. Exposing it to as many interested people as possible should improve that process, not hinder it. It may, however, make it more complicated, fraught, and time-consuming.

FP: In his review of your book in the May/June issue of Foreign Policy, David Weinberger writes, “Might not all of that which falls outside the scope of collaborative thinking have an even greater influence on existing institutions? Might the “babble,” as Leadbeater characterizes the Web when it’s not We-Thinking, be what truly shapes our democracy, economy, and culture?” How would you respond to that question?

CL: David is clearly right that the everyday to and fro of the Web is what its life is, chaotic, uncontainable, alive, unpredictable, funny, lewd, raucous. But what really interests me is when all that becomes something more than just interaction or social networking, when people start to find new ways to work together to create complex, reliable, innovative organizations and products. Is it a new way for us to come together to address our shared challenges and needs? I think it could be, and that is why it really matters.

Charles Leadbeater is the author of We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production (London: Profile Books, 2008).