Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a LazyCreation
I’m at the planning stages of an article for a Scottish arts magazine called Product about creative collaborations online, and the ways in which new technologies encourage collaboration and enable it.
Specifically, I want to know about collaborative works of art, music, literature, software development… whatever that could only have been made by taking advantage of what might broadly be called social software, rather than works that could have been made using extant real world means. (For example, An Exquisite Corpse is a project that could have been realised, as it was by the Surrealists in the first place, using ‘traditional’ means. The recently launched republication of Samuel Pepy’s Diary online, with its hyperlinks to present day maps and reader-annotations, could not.)
While thinking through the piece I’m planning, it occurred that I should practice what I intend to preach: that the internet and web is changing the way we think about making art - or in my case writing an article - collaboratively. So I’m invoking the LazyWeb to find people with ideas to share.
Does anyone have any experience of this new type of collaboration? Are you making the best work of your life with someone halfway across the globe, who you’re yet to meet in the flesh? Where are all these developments heading? What technologies are enabling your creative collaborations? How? Why? With whom?
You get the idea.
Needless to say, the ‘finished’ article will have a place on the web, under a Creative Commons or GPL licence as well as in print, so people will be able to continue the discussion, slate these ideas as nonsense, or… well, we’ll see.
Of course, I’m in a bit of a spot if no one responds!
Here’s a project you might be interested in:
The Open Blog Project at http://www.openblogs.org
Posted by Antoine Neron at 3pm on 21.01.03
Fray (.com), LazyWeb (.org), and Wikipedia are all community-driven.
The Fray depends on user submissions for 90% of the content; while the story is interesting, I read it to see how other people relate. Every story ends in a question that most everyone can answer.
The LazyWeb depends on user submission of ideas. It doesn’t matter what kind of idea it is, how useful or trendy it is, it just matters that someone cared to share their idea. Every idea has an answer out there, somewhere.
The Wikipedia depends on users for content management. It’s an open CMS, one that anyone on the Internet can use to improve that contained within. Every answer is collaborative.
Posted by Richard Soderberg at 6am on 22.01.03
I think you’ll find that h2g2 (a BBC Community website) demostrates this suberbly. I’ve given the link of the Collaborative topics that are used on the site. We link to an entry (what we call our articles) from our Front Page and ask our members to contribute to the topic of the week. The staff then write the information up into a conherent article, and publish it on the Front Page again, crediting all the people who have submitted content. We’ve had as many as 50 contributers to certain articles.
If you look at the link that I’ve provided, you’ll see a number of entries in various stages. We’ve been doing this virtually every week for nearly three years, and I think that you’ll find this meets your criteria. This couldn’t be done to this standard, this regularly, anywhere other than the internet.
Posted by Mina at 5pm on 22.01.03
Everything2 (.com) is 100% collaborative, and does not exist without user-provided content, period.
Kuro5hin (.org) is a user-driven website; content is generated and approved entirely by the user base.
Nupedia (.com) is kind of like Wikipedia; a public peer-reviewed general encyclopedia created by volunteer scholars, apparently.
There’s an entire DMOZ category on the subject of Open Content, at http://directory.google.com/Top/Computers/OpenSource/OpenContent/ . I suspect you’d appreciate the Encylopedias and Idea Banks subcategories, a LOT.
Posted by Richard Soderberg at 6am on 23.01.03
For collaborative art projects do check out SITO.org (http://www.sito.org)
Posted by steven hatch at 1pm on 23.01.03
Thank you everyone for the response - a few were on my list, a few are brand new to me, so that’s fabulous! I think I could have worded my LazyWeb invocation a little better - does anyone want to be interviewed via email about their personal experiences of creating collaboratively?
Posted by Jack at 2pm on 23.01.03
We’d be happy to be interviewed by email. The whole of h2g2 is a huge collaborative project, so if you want to get in touch we’ll happily answer. :-)
Mina
Posted by Mina at 4pm on 23.01.03