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By Charles Leadbeater
Linux has succeeded as a product only because the community that supports it has organised itself systematically to create, share, test, reject, and develop ideas in a way that flouts conventional wisdom. Successful We-Think projects are based on five key principles that were all present in Linux.
This article is excerpted from the newly published book We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity.
群体协作的5项准则
作者：Leadbeater
Linux能够成为一个成功的产品，是因为支持它的社群系统化地组织起来，用一种蔑视传统智慧的方式创造、分享、测试、摒弃以及发展各种理念。成功的We-Think项目基于5项关键准则，这些准则在Linux的开发中均有所体现。
本文摘自刚刚出版的“We-Think: The Power of Mass Creativity”一书。
Everything has to start somewhere. Somebody has to be willing to work harder than everyone else or nothing ends up getting done. Innovative communities invariably start with a gift of knowledge provided by someone, just as Linux started with the kernel that Linus Torvalds slaved over and which he posted on the Internet.
万事总有个开头。总得有人愿意比其他人干得更努力，否则只会一事无成。创新社群总是兴起于某些人播洒的知识火种，正如Linux起源于Linus Torvalds埋头苦干做出来并放到互联网上的内核。
A good core attracts a community of capable contributors and developers around it. The kernel has to be solid but unfinished, so open to improvement; if it were already complete there would be few opportunities to add to it. Jane McGonigal says the core to a successful game like I Love Bees depends on the starting-point being ambiguous and open to interpretation. Both the worm project to decode C. elegans' genome and I Love Bees began with a puzzle that could be solved only with the collaborative efforts of people with different skills. Steven Weber, a political scientist at Berkeley University in California, found that successful open source software projects tended to be 'multi-dimensional' and complex, thus inviting the involvement of people with different skills.' Thomas Kuhn summed up the ambiguous character of the core to a new intellectual community in his history of scientific revolutions. Kuhn argued that the possibility of a new scientific paradigm emerged when a small group of pioneers made a breakthrough that was
一个好的核心能把有能力的贡献者和开发者吸引到身边，形成一个社群。内核必须得是坚实的，但还没有完成，仍有改进余地。如果它已经完成了，就没什么机会让人再给它添砖加瓦。Jane McGonigal说，“我爱小蜜蜂”这个游戏成功的关键在于它开始的时候就是含混不清的，可以随意推演。解译秀丽隐杆线虫基因的“虫计划”和“我爱小蜜蜂”都是起始于一个谜题，有赖身怀异技的众人合力才能解决。加州伯克利大学的政治科学家Steven Weber发现，成功的开源软件项目呈现出“多维性”和复杂性，因此才需要具备不同技艺的众人参与。Thomas Kuhn在其科学革命史中将核心的含糊特性归结到一个新的智力社群。Kuhn认为只有当一小撮先锋取得了突破才可能出现新的科学范例，这种突破应该：
sufficiently unprecedented to attract an enduring group of adherents away from competing modes of scientific activity. Simultaneously, it was sufficiently open-ended to leave all sorts of problems for the redefined group of practitioners to resolve. “是前所未有的，足以从与之竞争的科学活动中吸引过来一群长期的追随者。同时，还 得是足够发散性的，有各种各样的问题留待参与者去解决。”
However, a core will develop only if its creators give away the material on which others can work, to which they can add and which they can refine. Successful innovation comes from a creative conversation between people who combine their different skills, insights and knowledge to explore a problem. We-Think is creating a new way for these conversations to emerge. A good core starts a creative conversation, and invites people to contribute.
然而，只有当创造者奉献出他的材料，使得众人可以对它进行加工，为之添加内容，或雕琢提炼，这样才能发展出一个核心。成果的创新来源于创造性的沟通，人们结合各自不同的技艺、洞察力和知识来共同探索问题。We-Think正是创造了让这种沟通发生的新方式。一个好的核心会引发一场创造性的沟通，并邀来人们作出贡献。
A successful creative community has to attract the right mix of people, who have different ideas and outlooks and access to tools that enable them to contribute. We-Think takes off only by getting the right answer to each of the following questions: Who contributes? What do they contribute? Why do they do so? And how do they do it?
一个成功的创造性社群必须吸引到一群合适的人，他们有不同的设想和观点，还要有能让他们作出贡献的工具。只有正确回答了以下的问题We-Think项目才能腾飞：谁做了贡献？贡献了什么？为什么会如此？他们是如何做到的？
Creative communities have a social structure. A relatively small, committed core group tends to do most of the heavy lifting: the discussion moderators in Slashdot; the original inhabitants of Second Life. These are the Web 2.0 aristocracy: people who because they have been around longer and done more work tend to get listened to more. There is nothing unusual in this. Most innovative projects, whether inside a company or a theatre group or a laboratory, start with intense collaboration among a small group which shares a particular passion or wants to address a common problem -- as did the worm researchers who gathered around Sydney Brenner at Cambridge. Often, however, such communities can become closed and inward-looking. To be dynamic, they have to open out to a wider world of more diverse contributors who add their knowledge or challenge conventional wisdom.
创造性社群也有社会结构。一个相对较小的、负责任的核心组通常承担了大多数的重活，例如Slashdot的管理员们，Second Life的最初居民。这些是Web 2.0时代的贵族：那些待得更久也做得更多的用户会更受重视。这也没什么不寻常的。大多数创新项目，无论是在公司、剧组或实验室里，都起始于一小群人的密切合作，他们都有同样的热情或想要解决同样的问题──正如聚集在剑桥大学[Brenner]身边的线虫研究者们。然而，这种社群经常会变成封闭而内向的。为了保持活力，应该向更广阔的外部世界中更多样化的贡献者开放，加入他们的学识，或让他们来挑战传统智慧。
We-Think projects take off when they attract a much larger crowd, who are less intensely engaged with the project. Their occasional, smaller contributions may in aggregate be as significant as the work initially done by the core. Linux, for example, as well as having 400 key programmers at the core, has close on 150,000 registered users -- akin to members -- who may only report the occasional bug in the program. Yet such a report may provide the starting-point for a much more significant effort at innovation. The make-up of the crowd is as important as the brainpower of the highly committed core. Crowds are intelligent only when their members have a range of views and enough self-confidence and independence to voice their opinions. Scott Page, a professor of complex systems at the University of Michigan, used sophisticated computer models to find that groups with diverse skills and outlooks came up with smart solutions more often than groups of very clever people who shared the same outlook and skills. Groups made up of many people who think in different ways can trump groups of people who are very bright but very alike, Page argues, so long as they are organised in the right way.
We-Think项目吸引到不过于热情参与到项目中的更广大的群众参与时才能腾飞。他们偶尔的、少量的贡献累积起来可能会与最初由核心成员做的工作同样重要。以Linux为例，在400位关键程序员组成的核心之外，还有150,000个注册用户（类似于会员），他们可能只会偶尔报告一下编程错误(bug)，而这种报告可能会给更为重要的创新努力提供一个起点。来自群众的拾遗补缺与高度参与的核心成员的脑力同等重要。群体智慧只有在其成员具备一些看法，拥有足够的自信，并且能独立发表自己的意见时才能够形成。密歇根大学研究复杂系统的教授Scott Page使用复杂的计算机模型发现，具备不同技艺和观点的群组，比起由非常聪明的共享同样的观点和技艺的人组成的群组，更经常提出巧妙的解决方案。Page认为，由许多思考方式不同的人组成的群组只要正确地组织起来，就能胜过由非常聪明但很相似的人组成的群组。
Page's explanation is that the more vantage points from which a complex problem is seen, the easier it becomes to solve. A group of experts who think in the same way is probably no better at devising a solution than just one of them, so adding more people who think in the same way is unlikely to improve a group's ability to come up with different solutions. Groups who think in the same way can often find themselves stuck at the same point -- akin to their being at the peak of a foothill in a mountain range, unable to climb to the higher peaks that lie beyond. A group who thinks in diverse ways, in contrast, is more likely to address a problem from many angles, less likely to get stuck and more likely to find a way out if it does get stuck. Diverse viewpoints are likely to generate more possible solutions and evaluate them in a wider range of ways. The right perspective can make a difficult problem seem easy. Innovation often involves trying out many vantage points before finding the one that makes the problem look simple. As Thomas Edison put it, 'We have found 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb.'
Page对此的解释是：对一个复杂的问题，从越有利的角度去看，就越容易予以解决。一组用同种方式思考的专家未必能比他们中的任何一个人更好地找到解决办法。因而增加更多同样思路的人不可能增加这个群组发现不同解决办法的能力。用同样方式思考的群组，常常会发现他们卡在了同样的地方，就像在山区里他们爬到了一个小丘的顶上，却无法爬上旁边更高的山巅。与此相反，具有发散思维的群组更可能从多个角度提出问题，而不太可能被问题卡住，即使卡住了也更可能发现一条出路。各异的观点更有可能产生更多的解决办法，能更广泛地对它们进行评估。正确的看法会让难题看起来也容易解决。创新常常涉及从多个有利角度进行尝试，以找到让难题变得简单的方法。正如Thoms Edison所说：“我们找到了1000个做不成灯泡的方法。”
Bugs in a software program often become apparent only when the program is tested in many different settings. Better 1,000 people making different tests at the same time than a single person making 1,000 tests one after the other. This explains why open source programs are often more robust that proprietary software: they have been tested much earlier by a much wider group of users. Bart Nooteboom, a professor at Rotterdam University, argues that distributed testing of this kind is vital to most innovation. He examined the development of 17th-century Dutch sailing ships and found that the designs mutated when the community of sailors tested and then adapted them to meet different conditions: first canals, then lakes, larger inland waterways, offshore sailing, the North Sea, the Atlantic and so on. We-Think allows ideas to be tested from a larger, more diverse set of vantage points more quickly and with ideas continually passing between the tightly knit core who develop them and the crowd who test them out.
一个软件的编程错误只有通过很多不同设置的测试才会显而易见。1000个人同时做不同的测试总好过一个人逐一做1000次测试。这就是为什么开源软件常常比专有软件更有鲁棒性的原因──它们在更早的阶段就被更广大的用户群测试过了。Rotterdam大学教授Bart Nooteboom认为，这种分布式测试对于很多创新都是极其重要的。他从研究17世纪荷兰的航海船只中发现，每当水手们尝试将船只用于不同条件时，船只的设计就会发生变化：先是在运河里，然后是湖泊，到更宽阔的内陆水道，再到沿海岸航行，进入北海，挺进大西洋，如此等等。We-Think让人们从更广泛更多样的有利角度更快地去试验一个想法，使得提出想法的核心成员与测试它们的大众之间产生持续的交流。
This testing becomes possible only when people can make the kind of contributions they feel happy with, which requires tools to allow them to get involved. Mass computer games thrive by making it easy for player-developers to pick up tools to create content. Blogging depends on easy-to-use software for writing and publishing online. The camera phone is now a ubiquitous tool for citizen journalism. Such tools are taking to mass scale the self-help ethic of the original computer hackers. The first versions of the Unix operating system, on which Linux is based, were created by lone programmers who could not afford to provide tech support to their users. So when they sent their programs to people, usually on a stack of floppy disks, they included a set of tools that allowed users to sort out problems themselves. When people can get hold of tools that allow them to produce aspects of a service, they start becoming players, participants and developers: newspaper readers become writers, publishers and distributors; bystanders become photographers; the audience can become reviewers and critics.
有了让人们乐于作出贡献的方便工具，这种试验才有可能进行。面向大众的电脑游戏要方便客串开发者的玩家动手创建内容才会兴盛。博客依赖于在线编写和发布的软件的易用性。照相手机现在已经无所不在，成为公民记者的一个工具。这种源于电脑黑客的自己动手的理念通过这些工具传播给了大众。Unix操作系统（也是Linux的基础）的最初版本是纯由程序员开发的，他们承受不起向用户提供技术支持。因而，当他们通过一大堆软盘向用户发放程序时，会在其中附加一些工具，让用户自己整理出遇到的问题。当用户掌握了这些某种程度上提供服务的工具，他们开始成为参与者和开发者，就像报纸的读者成为作者、出版商和发行商，旁观者成为了摄影者，观众成为评论员和批评家。
Perhaps the most perplexing question is not how people contribute, but why they do so -- particularly when they are not being paid and their work is given away. In open source software projects, a few are inspired by a hatred of proprietary software providers, especially Microsoft. A minority are driven by altruistic motives. Some see their involvement as a way to get a better job: by showing off their skills in the open source community they can enhance their chances of being employed. For the majority the main motivation is recognition: they want the acknowledgement of their peers for doing good work that they enjoy, that gives them a sense of achievement and in the process solves a problem for which other people are seeking a solution. Many of the most striking Web 2.0 success stories started when users created tools to solve a problem they themselves faced -- keeping track of all the blogs being created, sharing video and photographs online -- and which quickly got taken up by others who faced similar problems.
Open source gives away intellectual property so other people can freely use it. We-Think requires more than that: it is also an invitation to participate and collaborate in creating something. Open source ownership of a project becomes powerful when it enables mass collaborative approaches to innovation. For that to be possible many ideas have to be combined; contributors have to meet and connect with one another.
At the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904, an ice cream stand ran out of cups. The owner of the waffle stand next door started rolling his waffles to form cones. There was nothing new in either ingredient, but the combination of ice cream and the waffle created something entirely new. The more combinations a community can create, the more innovation there will be. Cities are creative when they make these combinations possible. The same is true of We-Think.
Diversity counts for little unless the different ideas that are floating around can be brought together to cross-pollinate. A community that is diverse but Balkanised will not be creative. People with different ideas must find a way to connect and communicate with one another. When they do, and in the right way, the results can be explosive. James Watson and Francis Crick unravelled the double-helix structure of DNA because they found a way to combine their very different outlooks. Crick's training spanned physics, biology and chemistry. Watson had trained as a zoologist but had become fascinated by DNA after studying viruses. They combined their ideas through constant, intense conversation of a kind of which their rivals were incapable. Watson and Crick's collaboration was a case of one plus one equals 12.
The larger the group and the more diverse perspectives are involved, the greater the benefits from combining them. Take five people, each with a different skill. That gives 10 possible pairings of skills. Add a sixth person with a different skill. That creates not 12 pairs but another five possible pairings 1 -- 115 in all. A group with 20 different tools at its disposal has 190 possible pairs of tools and more than 1,000 combinations of three tools. A group with 13 tools has almost as many tools -- 87 per cent -- as a group with 15 tools. Not much of a gap. But if a task requires combining four tools it is a different story. The group with 15 tools has 1,365 possible combinations of four tools. The group with 13 tools has 715, or about 52 per cent. Groups with larger sets of diverse tools and skills are at an advantage if they can combine effectively to take on complex tasks.
Markets are not the best way for people with diverse skills to connect and combine. A market might provide a way for someone with a problem to find someone else who might have a solution: if you have a leaking tap, you look for a plumber. That is the model of Innocentive, the scientific problem-solving community that was spun off from the drugs company Eli Lilly. Companies can post their scientific problems on Innocentive's Web site to see if they can be solved by one of the more than 100,000 scientists signed up to the market. But markets of this kind have inherent limitations: they work for specific problems that need exactly the right individual to solve them. They do not provide the basis for sustained creativity and innovation to explore difficult complex puzzles. That is a kind of problem-solving that comes only from intense collaboration. In the worm project, the researchers started by meeting in the coffee room at Brenner's laboratory. In We-Think, crowds need meeting-places, neutral spaces for creative conversation, moderated to allow the free flow of ideas. This is why, at their heart, these projects have open discussion forums and wikis, bulletin boards and community councils, or simple journals like Lean's Engine Reporter and the Worm Breeder's Gazette, so that people can come together in a way that allows one plus one to equal twelve many times over.
In We-Think projects, the task of combining ideas is made easier because the products usually fit together like Lego bricks: they are made from many interconnecting modules. Modularity is not new; it has been a feature of computer development since at least as long ago as the 1960s, when IBM was developing its System/360 computer. Fred Brooks, the person responsible, wanted everyone involved to be kept abreast of what everyone else was doing. Daily notes of changes to the program were shared with everyone. Quite soon people were starting work each day by sifting through a two-inch wad of notes on these changes. The costs of communication and coordination spiralled out of control. Miscommunication and misunderstandings grew. Adding people to the project did not solve the problem: more work got done, but more misunderstandings were created and with them more bugs. When the wad was five feet thick, Brooks decided to break the S/360 into discrete modules that could be worked on separately. A core team set some design rules specifying what modules were needed and how they should click together. This meant that module-makers could concentrate on their patch while the core team looked after the architecture of the system as a whole. New and better modules could be fitted into the system without its having to be redesigned from scratch.
Modularity really pays dividends when it is combined with open ways of working -- when it enables a mass of experiments to proceed in parallel, with different teams working on the same modules, each proposing different solutions. This combination is how open source gets the Holy Grail: a mass of decentralised innovation that all fits together. Just as Lego bricks come in a dizzying array of colours, shapes and even sizes but all have the same system of connectors, We-Think projects have rules for making connections that usually come from the core team. This is what allows a mass of independent but interconnected innovation. Mass computer games, collaborative blogs, open source programmes and the human genome project all share this feature: they click together masses of modules.
However, a Lego brick structure is not enough to make We-Think work. Groups also need to make decisions. Diverse contributors can combine their ideas only if they can agree how to collaborate. Any commons will fall into disrepair if it is not effectively self-regulated. That is far easier said than done.
A mass of contributions does not amount to anything unless together they create something ordered and complex. An encyclopaedia is not a mass of random individual contributions; it is a structured account of knowledge. People playing a game or building a community need to agree rules to govern themselves, or chaos ensues. How do We-Think communities govern themselves without an obvious hierarchy being in charge, enforcing the law? This challenge is not technical but political. We-Think works only when it has responsible self-governance, and that is a particularly difficult thing to achieve in highly diverse communities.
People often think in different ways because they have very different values; what matters to them differs. Someone who sees the world through art and images will acquire skills -- drawing and painting -- that make it easier for them to work. Someone who sees the world in terms of numbers and money is more likely to become an accountant, to use a calculator rather than a paintbrush. A large toolbox that includes both calculators and paintbrushes, both artists and accountants, is good for innovation.
The trouble is that people with fundamentally different values often find it difficult to agree on what they should do and why. Diverse ways of thinking are essential for innovation; diverse values, based on differences about what matters to us, often lead to squabbles. This is why diverse communities often find it more difficult agree on how to provide public goods, such as healthcare, welfare benefits and social housing. Diverse groups can become very unproductive when their differences overwhelm them, provoking conflicts over resources or goals. Elinor Ostrom found that shared fisheries, forests and irrigation systems required effective self-governance and local monitoring by participants to make sure no one was over-using resources. When local self-governance fails, the commons collapses and innovation becomes impossible.
We-Think succeeds by creating self-governing communities who make the most of their diverse knowledge without being overwhelmed by their differences. That is possible only if these communities are joined around a simple animating goal, if they develop legitimate ways to review and sort ideas and if they have the right kind of leadership. What they are not, ever, is egalitarian self-governing democracies.
As an example, consider the open source community that produces Ubuntu, a user-friendly version of Linux. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu's founder, is like a benevolent dictator and reserves some decisions for himself, such as the design of the Ubuntu Web site. The heart of the community, the technical board, meets online to set technical standards and to define what should be included in the different versions of the program. The board's decision-making is transparent and open: anyone can propose additions to policies through the Ubuntu wiki; the board's agenda is made available as a wiki every two weeks; and anyone can attend the online meetings as an observer. The decisions are taken, however, by Shuttleworth and four other board members, whom he appoints -- albeit subject to a vote among the community's lead programmers. Meanwhile a separate Ubuntu community council supervises the social structure, creating new projects and appointing leaders for teams that support different releases and features of the program, such as those for laptop users. Then there are the LoCo teams around the world who promote the use of Ubuntu in their country. Someone can become an Ubuntu member (an Ubuntero) by coding software, documenting changes, contributing artwork or acting as an advocate for Ubuntu. In mid-2007 the community had 283 core members. Those with most power and responsibility -- dubbed Masters of the Universe -- are the core developers and they have their own council to determine who should be allowed into their guild.
The lesson of Ubuntu -- which is still far from a proven success -- is that effective governance of creative communities is like a lattice-work. Decision-making is very open: anyone can see what is decided and how; anyone can make suggestions about what should be done. But the way decisions are made is rarely democratic. Ubuntu the product may be open source; the community that sustains it is far from open-ended. These are not like the Utopian communes of the 1960s -- which is why they might be more successful than cooperatives of the past.
We-Think enables a mass social creativity which thrives when many players, with differing points of view and skills, the capacity to think independently and tools to contribute, are brought together in a common cause. If the players are distributed they must have a way to share, combine and cohere around a common goal. However, for much of the time contributors may work independently and in parallel, often reworking elements of a core central product -- whether that's an epic poem in Ancient Greece, a piece of genetic code, a latter-day software program or an encyclopaedia. The product grows through accretion and a reciprocal process of observation, criticism, support and imitation. Most people take part because they get an intrinsic pleasure from the activity and seek recognition from their peers for the work they have done. These communities must have places -- forums, Web sites, festivals, gazettes, magazines -- where people can publish and share ideas. Social creativity is not a free-for-all; it is highly structured. Although the lines between expert and amateur, audience and performer, user and producer may be blurred, those with more standing in the community, based on the history and quality of their contribution, form something like a tightly networked craft aristocracy. Social creativity collapses without effective self-governance: decisions have to be made about what should be included in the source code, published on the site, pushed to the top of the news list. Participants who do not abide by the community's rules have to be excluded somehow. They must respect the judgments of their peers.
The raw material of these collaborations is creative talent, which is highly variable. People are good at different things and in different ways. It is difficult to tell from the outside, for example by time-and-motion studies, who is the more effective creative worker. It is impossible to write a detailed job description for a creative position specifying what new ideas need to be created by whom and by when. Open source communities resolve the difficulties of managing creative work by decentralising decision-making down to small groups who decide what to work on, depending on what needs to be done and the nature of their skills. It is very difficult for someone to pull the wool over the eyes of their peers; they will soon be found out. When it works, peer review excels at sharing ideas and maintaining quality at low cost. Conclusions
We-Think will not work where there is no core around which a community can form; where experimentation is costly and time-consuming, and so feedback slow; where decision-making becomes cumbersome or opaque, beset by complex rules; where the project fails to attract a large and diverse enough community. It will not take off if tools to add content are difficult to use; if contributors cannot connect to one another; if communities cannot govern themselves effectively and so either fracture or ossify. For many important activities, We-Think will make no sense at all: performing medical operations, cooking meals, running nuclear reactors, railways or steel mills. It is not well suited to tasks where only professional expertise will do. In late 2006 I had a minor operation and was very glad to find that the surgeon was not assisted by a group of pro-am butchers, bakers and candlestick-makers who were taking their lead from the Wikipedia entry on the procedure they were about to perform. (Pro-ams are people who undertake activities as amateurs but to professional standards.)
We-Think works only under certain conditions. Usually, a small group creates a kernel which invites further contributions. Its project must be regarded as exciting, intriguing and challenging by enough people with the time, means and motivation to contribute. Tools should be distributed, experimentation cheap and feedback fast, enabling a constant process of trialling, testing and refinement. The product should benefit from extensive peer review, to correct errors and ratify good ideas. Tasks should be broken down into modules around which small, close-knit teams can form, allowing a range of experiments to run in parallel. There should be clear rules for fitting the modules together and separating good ideas from bad. Ownership of the project must have a public component, otherwise the sharing of ideas will not make sense.
It is not all or nothing but a matter of degree: from No We-Think at one end of the spectrum, where traditional, closed and hierarchical models of organisation still make sense, to Full We-Think at the other end, with the likes of Linux and Wikipedia. In the middle, there will be lots of opportunities to blend some of these ingredients in different ways.
Blogging is a prime example: it allows a mass of people to contribute their views, but only rarely do they find a core to build around. Mostly, bloggers communicate into the ether. They have no desire to build something with others, merely to leave their mark on their little patch of digital space. Blogging is high on participation, low on collaboration. Flickr, the photo-sharing site, and YouTube, the video site, fit in this Low We-Think category: they allow a mass of participants to connect with an audience and with one another. Yet there is relatively little collaborative creativity. When YouTube becomes a platform for people to collaborate in making films together it may acquire some of the features of We-Think.
Social networking is Medium We-Think. Sites such as MySpace, CyWorld and Bebo have not yet encouraged much deliberate collaborative creativity, although some participants have begun to use them for example to support political candidates or to rally around causes they care about. Collaborative filtering and the book reviews and ratings on Amazon, and social tagging tools like Technorati and del.i.cious, through which people help one another find interesting material on the web, fit into this category.
Only when all our five conditions come together at scale to provide a deliberate, conscious form of social creativity in which many people contribute and collaborate does Full We-Think emerge. OhmyNews, the South Korean citizen-journalist news service, fits in here, as do mass computer games like World of Warcraft and scientific collaborations like the project to unravel the worm's genome. Full We-Think is the deliberate and organised combination of contributions from a mass of distributed and independent participants.
It would be silly to suggest that We-Think can work in every situation and that it is always the best organisational recipe. The challenge is to engage in more We-Think when it is appropriate, which is when we are collectively trying to solve a complex problem, or to create something that no individual could produce and where creative thinking is critical to develop ideas. We-Think will not touch all organisations but some will be transformed, and many will find some aspects of what they do changed, possibly quite fundamentally, by this new organisational recipe.
