Yesterday Ricardo and Frederico organised number three in a series of discussions centered round the topic of creative collaboration. Together with some 15 people we formed a nicely diverse group, something essential for effective collaboration. We started off with a very open discussion about the different meanings of ‘creative collaboration’ that were present. We broke down the main topic is its literal constituents 'co’ (together) and 'labor’ (work) signalling the need for joint effort, indicated the divergent aspect of 'creative’ versus the convergent character of 'collaboration’, spotted the trend of collaboration fuelled by online connectivity and touched upon the idea 'centralisation in decentralisation’ put forward by James Surowiecki in his book the Wisdom of Crowds.
Our group struggled with two different approaches that seem very related. The first examplified by Lars von Trier’s Gesamt, where one director sets the rules and indiviuals are invited to send in their footage to be filled in this skeleton structure. The second based on real life interaction, mutual feedback and collective decision making, much like the current event itself. The first one doesn’t require contributors to ever meet in person, yet in my eyes clearly shows creativity by shared effort. Perhaps crowd-sourced projects like this (life in a day, a day, the Johnny Cash project) are more accurately described by 'collective creativity’?
The opening discussion went far and wide, so it was good to focuss slightly on the topic of leadership in creative collaboration, while the other part of the group was biting into ownership in the same setting. Leadership flows, as we noticed by the way our conversation was steered in different directions in our initially leaderless group. For me it shows how leadership can be an emergent property arising from the local interactions within a group. Apart from that, it is also context-dependent, as leaders can step up when the setting is right for their expertise. A final important conclusion we came to was that much leadership lies in the structure that determines the interaction within a group. Leadership can then be embodied by a single police officer (or benevolent dictator for that matter) making everyone stick to the structure or it could be dispersed over every member of the group.
In the third part of the session I pitched Picnic. It was a good excercise to share the idea with people outside of the direct surrounding our network that is still mainly based around Goldsmiths. During the brainstorm that followed we tried to identify the next steps necessary for a sustainable growth of the community that we have already. Critical questions involved “Why do we want more people to join?” and “Who is Picnic for?”. Besides these fundamentals we were a bit future-oriented for the goal of identifying next actions while we focussed on features of the online platfrom to support our activity.
When we left the centre for creative collaboration, about an hour after the scheduled time, I tought it was great to see how we matched up form and content. We used the aggregation of each other’s skills to learn more about the very process we were involved with. More of this soon please! Read more details of the Picnic brainstorm here.