Charles Leadbeater, author of the Rise of the Social Entrepreneur and other myriad texts of interest, is publishing an interesting new book, entitled We-Think, next year. It seems to be bringing together various strands from his recent work into a coherent whole, particularly the Pro-Am Revolution stuff he did with Paul Miller at Demos.

To get a sense of what the book is about, here’s the introduction which bears a long quotation…:

"The basic argument is very simple. Most creativity is collaborative.
It combines different views, disciplines and insights in new ways. The
opportunities for creative collaboration are expanding the whole time.
The number of people who could be participants in these creative
conversations is going up largely thanks to the communications
technologies that now give voice to many more people and make it easier
for them to connect. As a result we are developing new ways to be
innovative and creative at mass scale. We can be organised without
having an organisation. People can combine their ideas and skills
without a hierarchy to coordinate their activities. Many of the
ingredients of these forms of self-organised creative collaboration are
not new – peer review for example has been around a long time in
academia. But what is striking about Wikipedia, Linux, Second Life,
Youtube and many more is the way they take familiar ingredients and
combine them to allow people to collaborate creatively at mass scale.

The
guiding ethos of this new culture and forms of self-organisation is
participation. The point of the industrial era economy, was mass
production for mass consumption, the formula created by Henry Ford. In
the world of We-think, the point is to take part, to be a player in the
action, to have a voice in the conversation. And in a participation
economy people want not services and goods, delivered to them, but
tools so they can take part and places in which they can play, share,
debate with others. Workers could be instructed, organised in a
division of labour. Participants will not be lead and organised in this
way.

The people who take part in these collaboratives are
neither workers nor consumers. They are participants and contributors.
If the 20th century marked the rise of mass consumerism, one feature of
the 21st century will be the rise of the mass participation economy:
innovation by the masses not for the masses. Innovation and creativity
have been elite activities, undertaken by special people – writers,
designers, architects, inventors – in special places – garrets,
studies, laboratories. Now innovation and creativity are becoming mass
activities, dispersed across society. We-think is an effort to
understand this new culture, where these new ways of organising
ourselves have come from and where they might lead. They started, as
most radical and disruptive innovation do, in the margins, in open
source, blogging and gaming. But they will increasingly become the
mainstream by challenging traditional, hierarchical, top down and
closed organisations to open up. They could change not just the way
that the media, software and entertainment works but also the way we
organise education, health care, cities and indeed the political system."

Which all looks and sounds very interesting. And in the spirit of creative collaboration, Leadbeater is making the book open to read, comment on and print out. Of particular interest to the social entrepreneur will be the sections on Open Work and Open Leadership; you get a taste of the latter from a recent article entitled  "Jimmy Wales, not Jack Welch" (pdf…)

[via Designing for Civil Society, via the Open Blog etc….]