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

Bill Buxton in conversation with Nora Young, at Mesh 08 in Toronto.

Our recent post on Bill Buxton was about his OOM (Order Of Magnitude) rule and how to use it to overcome creative blocks. This entry is about Buxton’s take on good design for telepresence and online collaboration technologies.

Speaking at the recent Mesh 08 web conference, and perhaps channeling Marshall McLuhan, Buxton described the role of a computer’s screen, speaker, microphone and camera as social prosthetics that extend the functions of human hearing, speech and sight online. He also proposed that both the social prosthetics as well as real world social factors have to be taken into account in order to design online collaboration technologies that are simultaneously less intrusive and more engaging.

To make one of his points about the disruptive nature of today’s online conferencing tools, Buxton staged an impromptu experiment of social intrusion (6:05 on the video) with the involuntary help of his interviewer Nora Young. The resulting reactions are both hilarious and informative.

In this TED video, Yale law professor Yochai Benkler talks about the Wealth of Networks, his concept and the name of his important book that explains the economic aspects on online collaboration.

Using high profile software projects such as the Apache web server, Linux and Wikipedia as examples, Benkler examines the far-reaching effects of commons-based peer production (his term for online collaboration) and declares that it is the next stage of human organization and economic production.

Footnote:
In an entirely appropriate turn of events, after Benkler’s book was published in printed form, it also became available under a Creative Commons license, giving people permission to download it for free from his website. This in turn spawned a wiki, giving readers all kinds of opportunities to collaboratively discuss the book and contribute their own ideas and insights around its themes.