Bracket’s lunchtime workshop at THE CUBE was a great success, with lots of interesting discussion about effective creative collaboration using online tools. Questions were raised around approaching intellectual property and attribution, managing egos and how to encourage people to use online tools (when all they want to use is e-mail!).
Creative Boom London kindly wrote a fantastic review of the workshop which covers all of these points (and more) in detail.
It looks like there’s been a hub of collaborative creative writing activity happening on the web this weekend!
A group of writers have set themselves up with the task to write and publish a book in just 24 hours using online tools to work together. The group has been using Google Docs to write and edit the document, as well as using Skype and face-to-face conversation to communicate, and have been updating us on their progress through their twitter profile.
A while back, ‘Mixing it up: adding new intellectual property models to your creative practice – part 1’ and ‘part 2’ looked at some of the reasons why a creative practitioner may or may not share intellectual property (IP) , and the Creative Commons framework that can be used to manage this.The use of Creative Commons is straightforward for incremental creative production, where an existing version is taken and developed or improved, but not so much for live collaborative projects where a group of people are working to develop something together at the same time.It’s also not possible to release something under Creative Commons to a specified community, so what might be the solution?
What are the reasons for sharing/not sharing IP? A recent Disruptive Social Innovators event covered this brilliantly. As already identified in ‘part 1′, a primary reason is financial – the need to make money from one’s ideas. But others might be:
to protect the integrity of a creative idea – preventing someone else from modifying or altering means that it will always stay as you intended
emotional attachment – if you have worked on an idea for so long, investing time and perhaps money, it may be more difficult to part with it
to gain personal recognition – self-promotion as an individual creative practitioner is vital, and being associated with strong ideas and work helps this.
Quite naturally, creative practitioners are concerned with protecting their intellectual property (IP) – developing and delivering new and original ideas is how they make their living. In the UK, traditional law focusses on prevention of copying, e.g. a piece of originally-produced work is automatically protected by copyright – no registration needed. However, although this works in the creative practitioner’s favour, those that wish to work collaboratively and embrace the new digital era are finding that this traditional model can be restricting. Frameworks exist, such as Creative Commons, which encourage individuals to share their creative work. Despite the advantages (more on this later) it can be quite daunting and confusing for those that need to generate an income.
Bracket has been working on a toolkit that can be used by those hoping to work collaboratively on a project with others. The initial framework is here. It is intended to be a work in progress, inviting contributions and developed as the model is tested. There are also some suggestions from facilitators/providers of social media, gathered from Social Media Camp London 08.
The model was developed with social designers hoping to initiate collaborative projects, at System Reload London. But maybe elements can be applied to other areas, ensuring that the specific characteristics and needs of the community are considered.
