Can Creativity Be Crowdsourced?

Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society hosts a lunch talk by Jon Ippolito of the John Bell of the University of Maine. From the event listing: “The Internet both attracts and repels art institutions. Curators wonder who could possibly ensure quality control in a world where 50,000 videos are added to YouTube each day. Fortunately, artists themselves were crowdsourcing long before the Internet: composer John Cage laid out the principles fourteen years before Richard Stallman founded the Gnu project and twenty-nine years before the term ‘open source’ was coined. In addition to collaborating on their own creative projects, artists have helped to build the very recognition networks necessary to find the Leonardos among the LOLcats. This month saw the public release of two social networks, The Pool and ThoughtMesh, designed to help collaborators and critics find and evaluate each other. Unlike existing publishing systems such as blogs and wikis, these networks aim to give ordinary users a ‘big picture’ as well, and include graphical and lexical tools that can help answer such questions as how networked creativity is enhanced or hurt by licensing choices, the number of contributors, and project lifespan.” More information here.

Author: Wade Roush

Between 2007 and 2014, I was a staff editor for Xconomy in Boston and San Francisco. Since 2008 I've been writing a weekly opinion/review column called VOX: The Voice of Xperience. (From 2008 to 2013 the column was known as World Wide Wade.) I've been writing about science and technology professionally since 1994. Before joining Xconomy in 2007, I was a staff member at MIT’s Technology Review from 2001 to 2006, serving as senior editor, San Francisco bureau chief, and executive editor of TechnologyReview.com. Before that, I was the Boston bureau reporter for Science, managing editor of supercomputing publications at NASA Ames Research Center, and Web editor at e-book pioneer NuvoMedia. I have a B.A. in the history of science from Harvard College and a PhD in the history and social study of science and technology from MIT. I've published articles in Science, Technology Review, IEEE Spectrum, Encyclopaedia Brittanica, Technology and Culture, Alaska Airlines Magazine, and World Business, and I've been a guest of NPR, CNN, CNBC, NECN, WGBH and the PBS NewsHour. I'm a frequent conference participant and enjoy opportunities to moderate panel discussions and on-stage chats. My personal site: waderoush.com My social media coordinates: Twitter: @wroush Facebook: facebook.com/wade.roush LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/waderoush Google+ : google.com/+WadeRoush YouTube: youtube.com/wroush1967 Flickr: flickr.com/photos/wroush/ Pinterest: pinterest.com/waderoush/