Networked Creativity : Madness and Mindfulness

brains! (Photo credit: cloois)

Creativity resists the control of conventional thinking.  At times it may appear as madness.  Places where conformity is the norm cause us to lose touch with the creative impulses within our brains, and subsequently innovation is lost.  Networked creativity frees us from the constraints of such places, unleashing the potential of our group brain.

These days creativity is thought to be a competitive asset, helping us to adapt and thrive.  To nurture creativity, we must kick aside those mental blocks that keep us comfortably numb and entice our brains to explore new territories.  We must open our minds to the vastness of social networks where anything is possible.

Stigmergic Collaboration: Environments Matter

The term stigmergy was first coined by Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s during his his research on termites. He found that a highly complex nest of termites simply self-organises “due to the collective input of large numbers of individual termites performing extraordinarily simple actions in response to their local environment.”

Stigmergy manifests itself in the termite mound by the fact that the individual labour of each construction worker stimulates and guides the work of its neighbour.^[1]

Communication is understood as providing the “cognitive context and situation awareness” necessary to collaborate.   A strong focus on “process” is said to overlook the “structural context” within collaborative environments, which are just as important.

Process is just one structural context within a broader collaborative environment.

Untangling data, untangling complexity

Amplified via Strange Attractors.

“The internet is the nervous system for an organism that is in the process of being born,” says John Perry Barlow, founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in talking about “vibrant data.”

Intel’s Vibrant Data project … At Digital democracy, …  potential to study patterns of data to learn more about how we build systems of trust and social capital.

Data aggregation can lead to annoying ads on your Facebook page… or it can facilitate new interactions, bringing people together to consume collaboratively, solve complex problems or anticipate emerging issues. How we as a society negotiate these tensions in what is an ethical free for all?

In the new era of data and citizen access, we also need to think about building government capacity and agility to ensure that data is respected, but also to inform government decision making and actions.

 

Swarm Creativity Framework

Business sustainability and collective intelligence

clipped via emeraldinsight.com

Research in the natural and social sciences has shown this conception to be too narrow. Intelligence is a property of collectives. For the purposes of this paper, one takes a collective to be some entity distinguished as being non-atomic. Ant colonies, swarms, flocks or herds are examples among the non-human animals. Collectives of people may exhibit superior problem-solving capabilities than any of their most intelligent members. Even individual intelligence may be conceived as the intelligence of the collective of neurons that constitute one person’s brain.

Author(s):	Paulo Garrido, (School of Engineering, Algoritmi Centre and Industrial Electronics Department, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal)
Citation:	Paulo Garrido, (2009) “Business sustainability and collective intelligence”, Learning Organization, The, Vol. 16 Iss: 3, pp.208 – 222
Keywords:	Business enterprise, Organizational theory, Sustainable development

Creativity is the primary asset in this framework.

Collaborate with Zombies (Future140 Part 4)

I was looking for another guest for Future140 and I got a hold of somone on Twitter who was attempting something rather inspiring. This person’s name is Ryan Leach and he knows a thing or two about zombies, but what attracted me to him was his effort to channel the power of the collective. His project depends on one thing in order to succeed, collaboration. It is called “Lost Zombies” and it combines zombie roleplaying with social networking and croudsourcing media in order to produce a film like none other that I’d ever seen. I was intrigued.

He left me a short message about his project. I uploaded it on Future140 as a micro-podcast (in 140 seconds or less (listen here!) ). He really inspired me.