Steve over at the Gilbane Publishing Practice Blog has a long post on the experiences of the the We Are Smarter Than Me project. We>Me, which I wrote about last year, is (was?) a project by MIT, Pearson and others to build a community to write a book about how building communities could help businesses. The results, as Gilbane tells it, are interesting.
Firstly, it became clear to the steering committee that they had to relinquish all control of the project to the community in order for the community to flourish. There can be no half-measures in crowd-sourcing: you either let people do exactly what they want, or they won’t do it. This was demanded by the users, and the original editorial board had no choice to go along with it. In the end, they realised that this did energise the project.
However, freeing up the community also meant that the final book was not acceptable on delivery: “To yield an acceptable business book, it would be necessary to hire an accomplished professional author who would also handle the fact checking process.” This is not that unexpected, but it is a problem - particularly if that editor has to negotiate edits with X hundred authors…
There are some other insights as well - not least that the originally intended participants, tenured professors at Wharton and MIT, refused to participate, and that this didn’t make any difference in the long run - that make the Gilbane report worth reading in full. But it’s interesting to compare too with the Million Penguins project, as the final reports on that make pretty much the same observation: the journey was more interesting than the destination. It doesn’t matter whether you’re writing a business book or a novel; for the participants, the act of creation is more important than the end result.
Is this, then, the central quality of the wikibook? Crowdwriting - or many-to-many publishing, as Gilbane puts it - is inherently selfish. It’s not in the individual author’s best interest to make their shard integrate well with others - in fact, the opposite may be true. Altruism exists, but it’s balanced with self-promotion, of one kind or another. But perhaps we should pick apart that phrase, ‘many-to-many publishing’ - something there resists the urge to put an end to the endeavour. Like Wikipedia, is a wikibook - by its very nature - permanently unfinished? One of the core perceived attributes of book 1.0 is that it represents the “one true version” - yet many of our most culturally important books - think of the Bible, or the works of Shakespeare - exist in multiple versions.
Perhaps, if we are to understand the wikibook, we need to place it in the context of mythical texts, like the Bible and other religious and historical works. They share the same core attributes: multiple authors, disputed authorship, multiple versions, endless potential versions, authors and versions distributed across time and space and filterable by the reader/editor’s prejudices. The only thing we can do is add metadata to aid historians, tracking changes and creating concordances.
With the need for a “one true version” removed, we promote the reader to editor, and the relationship graph becomes truly many-to-many, instead of passing through the editorial bottleneck. Combine this with innovative licensing which allows for-profit publication of remixed text (CC3.0 now available), and you have the seeds of a new literary culture…
In a great example of books+technology improving the world, Mike Anderson of Troubled Diva has persuaded 100 bloggers to provide a humourous short piece of writing for a book to be sold in aid of Comic Relief. The whole project was pulled together in seven days flat and published via Lulu, where you can now buy the book.
Including contributions from such luminaries as comedians Richard Herring and Emma Kennedy, BBC 6Music presenter Andrew Collins, James Henry, scriptwriter from Channel Four’s ‘The Green Wing’, and my tipster Siobhan, you can find out more about the project at Troubled Diva. And it’s all for a good cause…
Mike’s appealing for everyone possible to promote, link to, and buy the book, so, please, do likewise.
Ficlets is a new site for authoring CC-licensed text snippets which others can play with. It’s pretty cool, and what’s more amazing is it’s come out of AOL. It’s not dissimilar to Yarn, which I mentioned earlier:
ficlets are shorter than short stories. Well, no, actually, they are short stories, but they’re really short stories. Really short, as in there’s not a maximum word count … there’s actually a maximum character count (1,024). There is also a minimum character count, and the number of that beast is 64.
If you wish, we’ll provide you with inspiration (photos, themes, suggested beginnings and endings, even other ficlets), but you’re completely free to blaze your own trail. Now, here’s where the real fun comes in: Each and every ficlet is modular in that, though you may have written a stand-alone story with a beginning, middle, and ending, your fellow ficleteers may choose to write a prequel or sequel to your story. In this respect, you can think of ficlets as literary Legos.
All ficlets are covered under Creative Commons, which means that if you wrote it, you own it. Period.
To give you an idea of what you can do with 1,024 characters, that is the exact length of this “About Ficlets” description
They had to leave a period off the end there, but you get the idea. Ficlets is beautifully implemented and easy to use. There’s also a strange, cool imagination at work here - the ‘Inspiration‘ link pulls random photo sets out of Flickr to spark your creativity, as well as an ‘on this day’ snippet from The History Channel, and some random lines. It’s a beautifully simple mash-up that works very well.
I can’t help thinking of a Yahoo Pipes type GUI to stitch them together into persistent, save-able stories - the current implementation is more of a choose-your-ow-adventure deal, and I don’t have an AOL screen name to see exactly what AIMShare does (OpenID AOL?). But I’ll still be wasting plenty of time there…
[UPDATE: Thanks to Jason Garber in the comments for pointing out that Ficlets does take OpenID. Nice one, guys.]
There’s been a bit of media attention in the UK lately around some children’s books which have been appearing as part of a new initiative to increase tolerance and reduce homophobic bullying in schools. Books such as And Tango Makes Three, the story of two male penguins in a committed relationship in Central Park zoo, and King & King, a new twist on the old Prince-and-Princess fairytale, introduce the concepts of same-sex love and relationships to young children.
There has been the predictable response from religious groups who view such books as ‘forcing’ alternative sexualities on children, or somehow tempting them into homosexuality themselves (see this Guardian article). The alternative case is so frequently mis-represented that it bears stating here: homosexuality, not being a choice, is a reality in the lives of many children and young adults, either by being the offspring or ward of same-sex couples, or, later, being their own experience. Homophobic bullying is so widespread that increased tolerance not only helps kids who are actually gay, but those whose lives are made miserable by homophobic taunts even if they themselves are not gay.
As Elizabeth Atkinson, director of the No Outsiders project which is promoting the books, puts it so well: “What books do not say is as important as what they do.” To deliberately leave images of gay relationships out of children’s books is to censor social reality.
This controversy - over the same books - cropped up a while back in the States, and I wrote about it then for STML, my literary blog (link contains images some consider NSFW). Look there to see the historical background to this debate.
What’s the booktwo angle on this post? Well, there’s not much of one, except to say that technology, it is hoped, can help educators and students circumvent the strictures of religious or state-sanctioned intolerance to free up debate around controversial issues. Organisations such as the ALA use the internet to raise awareness with projects such as Banned Book Week, to keep records of most challenged books, and to advise librarians on how to deal with such challenges. Libraries such as that at UPenn create online repositories of censored works, accessible to all (worth noting that that the current Swotter text, James Joyce’s Ulysses, is on that list). Think Tanks such as the Free Expression Policy Project place book censorship alongside restrictive DRM and aggressive internet filtering on their issue list. The debates will continue, but the new can stand alongside the old in our continuing quest for personal and intellectual freedom and tolerance.
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