The Pond, an Octopz blog on communication, collaboration and coworking online.

Tim Berners-Lee (TBL), the inventor of the World Wide Web, recently remarked that developing online means of fostering collective creativity is the next major challenge for the web. Berners-Lee, echoing some of Douglas Engelbart’s pioneering ideas on online collaboration, made his remarks during his keynote presentation at the Tetherless World conference on the future of the Web.

According to Berners-Lee, the Web should evolve into a system that allows people to connect and share partly-formed ideas online that with the help of others can be turned into solutions to huge and pressing problems.

How can we make the Web be an infrastructure that allows more than one person to think more effectively than one person can? There’s no proof yet that for creative thinking we’ve done that. The challenge is to build a system that allows the formation of half-formed ideas and allows collective creativity.”

A video recording (with slides) of Tim Berner-Lee’s keynote is here. The part on collective creativity begins around the 60 minute mark. Computerworld reported on the keynote here.

Related Pond post: Douglas Engelbart, online collaboration pioneer

Douglas Engelbart is best known as the inventor of the computer mouse but his pioneering work and influence extend far beyond that device. A towering figure in computer science, Engelbart’s fundamental tenet is that computers should help us become smarter and work together better.

In December 1968, at the Fall Joint Computer Conference, Engelbart gave the first public multimedia demonstration of a networked computer system which brought together the mouse, cathode-ray tube displays, windowing systems, text editing, hyperlinks, videoconferencing and networked collaboration.

This 90-minute presentation, dubbed the “mother of all demos”, presented a compelling vision of how computers and online networks could be used to augment human capability. It’s a vision that we are still trying to realize today.

For more on Doug Engelbart check out the Invisible Revolution documentary and MouseSite.