I had the great pleasure of co-leading a conversation about “the remix” at the EduCon gathering on January 29-31. Held at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, the conference focuses on innovation and the future of schools & education. Here is the description of our session, The Art of the Remix in the Social Media Classroom, from the conference website:

Remixing is as old as art itself. As digital technologies expedite the transition from passive consumers of text to an engaged, read/write culture, we explore the pedagogical benefits of the remix in relation to literacy and tackle the thorny issues of plagiarism and illegal appropriation.

I worked with Leif Gustavson, a professor from Arcadia University, who teaches pre-service graduate students studying education. His students regularly use MixedInk to craft collaborative reflections on their field work, remixing their unique ideas into one collective piece.

Leif started our EduCon conversation with an experiment in collaborative writing: the exquisite corpse. The exquisite corpse is a game that originated with the Surrealists in the 1920s, and, as André Breton describes, is a “game of folded paper played by several people, who compose a sentence or drawing without anyone seeing the preceding collaboration or collaborations.” The game was named when Surrealists first played the game and came up with this phrase: “The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine.” Reflecting on the exquisite corpse, Breton says: “What excited us about these productions was the assurance that, for better or worse, they bore the mark of something which could not be created by one brain alone…”

We played this game during our conversation at EduCon, resulting in a wonderful (or shall I say exquisite) set of exquisite corpses. Check out a few of my favorites below!

1.
A trampoline of brain sparks
Staring into the abyss
Ring fingers
Panicked
Snow crunches beneath me
I want more cake
Chocolate, melted and sticky
Groceries on the mind
Sense of wonder
Time
To engage completely
The unexpected fate

2.
Time stood still
Cold nose wet paw
A warm buzzing
Singing loudly
Yellow sunshine
Dynamism between rabblerousing
A little too close for comfort
Another knuckle sandwich
Rabbit poop
Group effort, one mind
Nice!

3.
Pressured body
Hidden by an open window
Missing myself, feeling old
Stinky grids
Through the wind
Showing creativity
Leaping off twitter cliffs
Tiny little redundancies
Stillness

4.
Falling lightly
Patience
Snowflakes dancing underneath
It became so important
A vast! Below!
Lithesome beauty
Feeling relaxed with green
With fallen leaves crunching beneath my feet
Quiet
Change the channel!
Breath of air
The pen explodes on paper

Pretty impressive! When we started the process, I noticed a bit of nervousness in the group. Very quickly, though, the process erased the stress, since we shared responsibility for the end product. The weight of writing was broken down into something manageable – and fun. In the end, we were struck by the surprising cohesion of the poems we created – what Nicolas Calas described as the “unconscious reality in the personality of the group.”

MixedInk enables exactly this sort of interaction – by encouraging people to build upon each other’s ideas, it removes the barrier of getting a first draft on paper. With MixedInk, original versions are just a foundation, the building blocks for something new. As one of Leif’s students said after using MixedInk, “In the end, you have this amazing explosion of thoughts and ideas that belong to a group of people.” I love how the exquisite corpse process leads to the same end – what another student described as “creating new meaning through the mixing of everyone’s words.”

Many thanks to Leif for helping us discover MixedInk’s surrealist roots!  If you have a collaborative writing experiment for us to try, please leave it in a comment.

In partnership with Carles Campuzano, a member of the Spanish Parliament, and NuestraCausa, a Spanish non-profit organization, MixedInk is excited to launch Spanish and Catalan versions of its collaborative writing platform!

To coincide with an important debate around immigration in the Spanish Parliament, Campuzano is inviting the public to craft a collective text that represents its most popular ideas and opinions about immigration using MixedInk. Campuzano has pledged to fully consider the public recommendations and hopes this will lay the groundwork for future participatory projects.

NuestraCausa is promoting MixedInk’s platform in Spain to bring citizens closer to decision makers – their goal is to enable people to influence public policy decisions. Among its many projects, NuestraCausa is partnering with Personal Democracy Forum to plan a European version of its annual conference, which explores the intersection of technology and politics, in Barcelona this November.

In the United States, government officials and agencies have paved the way for such groundbreaking projects. For instance, Representative Anthony Weiner used MixedInk’s platform to collect opinions about health care, and the White House used the platform to crowdsource policy recommendations for achieving open government. Needless to say, we are excited to see the same energy around citizen participation in Spain.

NuestraCausa is at the forefront of promoting citizen participation – and extending some of the lessons from the Obama campaign – into Spain and throughout Europe. We look forward to a fruitful, collaborative relationship with Marc, Javier, Gemma, Maria, and the rest of the NuestraCausa team as more and more leaders around the world recognize the value of citizen input!

Check out the coverage this project has already attracted:
• Un diputado de CiU, primer político español que utiliza MixedInk
• CiU apoya la reforma del Gobierno si refuerza las competencias en inmigración
• Campuzano (ciu) abrirá un debate en la red sobre la reforma de la ley de extranjería
• El PSOE se asegura superar la primera votación en el Congreso de la Ley de Extranjería con los votos de CiU

To use MixedInk’s writing platform in Spanish or Catalan, just put “es.” or “ca.” at the start of the URL. For example, to see http://mixedink.com/CarlesCampuzano/Inmigracion/ in Spanish, use: http://es.mixedink.com/CarlesCampuzano/Inmigracion/. Soon, we’ll make it even easier to toggle languages automatically.

If you’re interested in using MixedInk in any other languages, let us know by sending an email to info-at-mixedink-dot-com. With help from folks like Carlos Campuzano and the Nuestra Causa team, we hope to eventually make MixedInk available the world over!

Check out this video, singing praise for tools that tap people’s knowledge – whether using prediction markets to forecast everything from election results to American Idol winners to asking the audience tough questions answer on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.  They point out that people – collectively – perform consistently better than the pundits and experts.  Our post on prediction markets makes many of the same arguments.

Based on our last test of MixedInk, we’re convinced that our 30-headed pundit did better than any individual one of us could have alone!

We just tested out the latest version of our tool, and I wanted to share the results.  The short version: the test was a success!

Last week, 30 beta testers (read: friends) used MixedInk to help write a letter to the editor explaining why Barack Obama shouldn’t choose Hillary Clinton as his VP.   (We did not select this subject on our own – we gave our participants a few topics to choose from, and this is the one where there seemed to be greatest consensus.)

Here’s what they created together:

What are FAQs?
FAQ stands for Frequently Asked Questions, as you are likely already aware. What you probably also know is that the FAQ page pretty much always includes the answers to those questions, not just the questions themselves. So technically they should be called Frequently Asked Questions & Provided Answers. “FAQPA” doesn’t have the same ring to it, though, so we’ll be sticking with FAQ.

Who cares which questions are asked most frequently?
Well, you do, in theory, and we do too. The idea is that you think like other people do, more or less. So if MixedInk makes other people wonder about certain things, there’s a good chance that it makes you wonder about the same things. Instead of you and every other person with a question asking separately and us sending you each an individual response, why not save everyone the time and just gather all the questions and answers in one place?

Why spend an entire blog post on FAQs?
Good question. We just wrote the FAQs for our site, and we were so excited to share them with you! But we realized we probably ought to wait till the site launches (soon!) to do that. So this was sort of a consolation prize.

So can we at least see some of your FAQs? You promised a “sneak preview” in the title of this post.
Sure! Here’s a taste of what’s to come:

Why use MixedInk?
In order for your opinion to matter, you have to lump yourselves together with lots of other people by voting, signing a petition, going to a rally, etc. That means you have to give up control over the message you deliver. MixedInk helps you express yourselves together without losing your individual, nuanced voice. Since MixedInk is democratic, it ensures that you have more control over what you say together.

For companies, nonprofit organizations and campaigns, it can be difficult and expensive to wade through thousands of emails, blog posts, comments and phone calls to understand what stakeholders are thinking and saying. MixedInk provides a way to harness the energy, ideas, and opinions of their most passionate members, consumers, and employees.

How many people can participate in responding to a MixedInk topic at once?
In theory, there’s no limit to the number of people that can contribute at the same time.

How can the software automatically put so much text from so many people together?
It can’t – we don’t automatically assemble a collective piece of text. We just give users the tools for them to do it themselves, by working (playing, really) together.

Is it simple majority rule?
For now, yes. Later on, we’ll make it possible to see how contributors can be divided into different camps based on the opinions they express. In the meantime, any contributor who feels he or she is in the minority can set up a new topic and ask that only those with shared views participate.

Can I republish a final collective response written using MixedInk?
You certainly can – and we hope you do!

All text that is authored by a group using MixedInk is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. That means you can republish the content as long as you mention: “This text was created by [number] people using the democratic collaborative tool at MixedInk.com. It may be republished only if accompanied by this addendum.”

If you are republishing it online, you must also include a link to the page where you found the text.

That’s all?!? You teases!
If you’re so anxious to find out more, why haven’t you signed up to be a beta tester yet?

Right. So how did you write the FAQs for MixedInk, which hasn’t launched yet, given that you don’t know which questions are actually going to be “frequently asked”?
OK, smarty pants, you got us there. We don’t know which questions will be frequently asked. We had to guess. But we’ll update the FAQs later when we find out what questions people actually ask.

Do other sites abuse the FAQs like this?
We don’t know for sure, but it sure seems like it to us. We feel lucky if half of the FAQs are remotely relevant to our concerns, so we’d bet they were also written without actually being “frequently asked.”

That doesn’t justify the practice of determining FAQs without user input, however.

If your collaborative writing software is so darn great, why don’t you just let your users write your FAQs?
Hmmmm… we hadn’t thought of that. Seems like a good idea. Maybe we’ll try that when we are fortunate enough to have users.

Other sites’ users could write the FAQs for them, too.
Another good idea – you’re full of them. Maybe we should hire you.

Where can I find your FAQs after you launch?
We’ll put them up here: http://www.mixedink.com/faq. (Note that this link will not work until we launch.)

Where should I go if I’m tired of reading this senseless drivel and actually want to learn something about FAQs?
Here’s a few sites we consulted as we constructed our FAQs:
http://www.faqs.org/faqs/faqs/about-faqs/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ
http://www.querycat.com/ (database of FAQs from the entire internet)

Is your blog always going to be this…playful…from now on?
Probably not. Must be the holidays

By 2012, one quarter of entertainment will have been created, edited, and shared within peer circles, rather than coming out of traditional media groups.  This is the conclusion of a global study on the future of entertainment, called “A Glimpse of the Next Episode,” conducted by Nokia and The Future Laboratory.

In carrying out the study, The Future Laboratory interviewed entertainment industry leaders as well as trend-setting consumers from 17 countries about their digital behaviors.  This was combined with Nokia’s own research from its 900 million consumers around the world to construct a global picture of entertainment over the next five years. 

Nokia termed the phenomenon Circular Entertainment, noting that people are showing “a genuine desire not only to create and share their own content, but also to remix it, mash it up and pass it on within their peer groups – a form of collaborative social media,” according to Nokia’s Multimedia Vice President Mark Selby.  Trends Director at The Future Laboratory Tom Savigar added, “Consumers are increasingly demanding their entertainment be truly immersive, engaging and collaborative.” 

At MixedInk, we have been very busy developing a collaborative writing tool to satisfy this demand.  Where blogging has enabled anyone to share their thoughts online, MixedInk is excited about making it easy and fun to remix and mash up opinions within a group to generate newer, bigger, and more compelling ideas. “Key to this evolution is consumers’ basic human desire to compare and contrast, create and communicate,” notes Savigar.  We agree.  While wikis have allowed people to write together online, we are making it easy for people to compare and contrast what many different people think – and communicate easily about those opinions. 

“Whereas the act of watching, reading and hearing entertainment was passive, consumers now and in the future will be active and unrestrained by the ubiquitous nature of circular entertainment,” says Savigar. 

MixedInk will help this expanding movement to grow.  We are motivated because we believe that an active and passionate group can create stronger, more powerful content than its individual members could produce alone.  And perhaps most importantly, we are inspired by the potential for such a platform to democratize the political arena, the media, and the workplace. 

“We believe the next episode promises to deliver the democracy politics can only dream of,” says Savigar.  We already see the beginnings of this evolution, and we look forward to playing our part in making it a reality. 

Get ready. The Next Episode will be written by you. 

Thirty family members and friends of the MixedInk team recently came together to test our software. It was very exciting to finally see MixedInk in action at this scale after much hard work and internal testing. Watching an interesting discussion take shape and participating in the eventual synergy that emerged over the five-day period was an extremely rewarding experience.

Together the participants addressed the following question: Is the US government ever justified in using torture? Why or why not?

(We chose this topic because we know people feel strongly about it. Having a topic that encourages vigorous discussion makes testing our software and concept easier).

Participants wrote, edited, and recombined responses to the topic throughout the test. With a total of 44 responses and 296 ratings in the end, the group had a vibrant brainstorming session and a fascinating exchange. Through a process of mixing and rating each other’s responses using MixedInk technology, the test participants collaboratively sculpted a collective opinion on the selected topic.

For those who are curious, we’ve pasted the text of the collective response below.

This is a major moment for MixedInk – this test provided definitive proof of our concept. We learned a ton from the test and are now tweaking old features and adding new ones based on the test and on the feedback we received. At this point, we plan to continue testing it with different and bigger groups – let us know if you’d like to help shape MixedInk by getting involved in future tests at testing@mixedink.com. We’d love to get your input!

No to Torture

In the wake of 9/11, we have begun to speak a new language. “Patriotism” means blind devotion to any government policy; to “support the troops” means to never question an interminable war; and “torture” means making the world safe for democracy. (heh, heh, heh). We are living in a world of contradictions and are facilitating it with a language of opposites. It is easier to accept an unwarranted war, corruption, and torture when they are cloaked in words like democracy, strength, and safety. But eventually we will run out of platitudes and be left with nothing but the bare truth of our actions.

Torture has fallen prey to the cover of new speak. By saying we’re protecting our way of life from terrorism, we have become terrorists ourselves and what once was abhorrent to Americans has become acceptable. The question in real speak, though, is what security do we truly gain from the use of torture? Of the multitude of tools in our security arsenal, torture is one that has been shown to fail — people will say anything to get themselves out of the situation. This is particularly true in the case of terrorism, where people are often motivated by martyrdom, and just a bit more courage as a tortured prisoner can earn a handsome payoff in the afterlife. In embracing torture as a society, we therefore lose not only our honor, but also our precious resources as we waste time and money following false leads.

Even if torture were shown to be an effective information-gathering tool, however, it still would not be a sound security policy. When we commit torture against prisoners, we place our own soldiers at great risk as we forego our authority to demand protection for them. Today other countries can easily follow our lead in playing semantic tricks to determine where the Geneva Conventions apply. If that were the case, and our soldiers were being tortured at the hands of another countrys interrogators, be sure that this discussion would need not occur; our collective outrage would be unanimous.

More importantly, we cannot discuss torture without examining what it means to be part of a society that allows it. Many claim that we need to rethink our domestic policies, and even internationally-accepted norms, given the new threats we face. We disagree. In fact, it is only at times when we are scared for our safety that we must recall the importance of our civil liberties. It is during these times that it is easiest to forgo our most important ideals for the illusion of safety and expedient answers to complex challenges.

The American justice system relies upon the idea that a person is innocent until proven guilty. And we have a very high bar for guilt; a jury must be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt. The implicit understanding is that we, as a society, would prefer to let a guilty person go free than wrongly punish someone who is innocent. We depend upon our right to due process of law to ensure that our government does not overstep its bounds. When we allow torture of someone suspected of a crime (or suspected to be privy to critical information), we corrode this deep foundation of our country by exacting punishment based on mere suspicion. Not only does it undoubtedly lead to the torture of many people with no, or little, connection to terrorist networks, but it also leads to a dangerous temptation to blur the distinctions. And just like that, we begin down a slippery slope of disintegrating civil liberties.

Nearly everyone agrees torture is generally wrong, but there is still a great temptation to allow torture as a last resort in extreme cases. Torture, however, is not an acceptable government policy even in these scenarios. We have seen time and time again that seemingly normal people can do awful things. We saw it during Milgrim’s famous psychology experiments, we witnessed it during the Holocaust, and we stood speechless more recently when we learned of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib. If we condone even a single case of torture, how will we then stop it from expanding? Who is to be the judge? Any policy that allowed torture would be subject to abuse. Enforcement is extremely difficult to imagine, given that these prisoners would be punished without the benefit of being tried in court, and an interrogator could always argue there was good reason to believe the prisoner had valuable information.

There is a short list of countries that permit torture, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, North Korea, and Uzbekistan. It is not a club that the

United States should wish to join. As we seek to remain a world leader, we must remember what it means to be American and the moral authority it could command. We should not throw it all away in exchange for nothing more than a second-rate intelligence tool. It’s time to speak clearly and realize that torture debases not only the victim but also the core of all we, in real talk, hold precious in America.

As is clear from this example, the group of our friends and family that created this lean to the political left. Note that MixedInk is emphatically nonpartisan. Our tool will be available to any group wishing to express itself together regardless of its opinion.

Thirty-one years ago this month, a U.S. Federal Court ordered George Harrison to give up the majority of royalties from his hit song “My Sweet Lord” because he had unintentionally, subconsciously copied a Chiffons’ melody as the basis for his own song. Harrison was never accused of plagiarism, he was instead found guilty of Cryptomnesia, otherwise known as unconscious plagiarism.

Cryptomnesia is not limited to the realm of music. Carl Jung noted in a speech in 1905 that Friedrich Nietzsche’s book “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” includes an almost word for word account of an incident from a book published half a century before Nietzsche’s. This is neither considered purposeful plagiarism nor pure coincidence. Nietzsche’s sister confirmed that he had indeed read the original account when he was 11 years old. Similarly, in 1916, Heinz von Lichberg published a story called “Lolita”. Forty years later Vladimir Nabokov wrote a novel by the same name, with the same plot, but to quite a bit more acclaim.

However not all cases of cryptomnesia have been of such literary import. Who could forget the episode of Seinfeld in which Elaine is ecstatic to sell a cartoon to The New Yorker only to find out she has unconsciously penned a Ziggy. From Seinfeld episode “The Cartoon”:

Jerry: You ripped off a Ziggy?

Elaine: It must’ve seeped into my subconscious, Puddy has Ziggy bed sheets.

Modern examples of this phenomenon are too numerous to list although two of the more recent, blatant examples come from pop music. Avril Lavigne’s new album includes songs sounding similar to those of seventies bands the Rubinoos and Peaches. The Red Hot Chili Peppers recent hit “Dani California” is almost a direct musical copy of Tom Petty’s “Mary Jane’s Last Dance”.

But what is the world of art, literature, music and thought without unconscious plagiarism? Of course we are all influenced by what we have seen, read and heard throughout our lives. It would be a feat of either extreme insanity or intense isolation to create a piece of content without influence or reference. This very blog post is both an intentional plagiarism of the sources linked to herein and an unintentional plagiarism of sources too numerous to even imagine.

Now here of course it should be noted that this is not an endorsement of actual, illegal, plagiarism. Passing off someone else’s work as your own is as wrong now as it ever was or ever will be. This instead is an argument for systemic change in how we use creative content as a society, which may be achieved without breaking any laws.

The internet has both increased our exposure to content and made it easier to appropriate that content for our own purposes. Many blogs have made a name for themselves by simply linking to content elsewhere on the web. The original creator may only be revealed after following a seemingly endless chain of links, some of which may take you back to where you started.

The internet has begun to enable content sharing, mash-ups and collaboration. Similarly, artists, writers and thinkers have begun to realize this shift and even embrace it in some cases. Bestselling novelist Jonathan Lethem (author of “Motherless Brooklyn” and “Fortress of Solitude”, two of my favorite books, both of which I intend to unconsciously plagiarize at some point) has launched The Promiscuous Materials Project. On the website Lethem is giving away a number of his stories and songs for users to “adapt or mutate” as they please. He also lists thirty projects in which others have created songs, stories and movies by reshaping his work.

Sharing content inevitably leads to interesting – if not superior – versions, which can even open up the original work to a larger audience. The perfect example of this is the “Grey Album”. When hip hop mogul Jay-Z released the “Black Album,” he put out a lyrics-only version in order to encourage mixing and sampling. A little known producer named Brian Burton, aka Danger Mouse, fused the music from the Beatles “White Album” with lyrics from Jay-Z’s “Black Album” to create the groundbreaking “Grey Album”. Despite the fact that it was never marketed or released, Rolling Stone called it “the ultimate remix record” and Entertainment Weekly ranked it the best record of 2004. Beyond launching Danger Mouse’s career and giving Jay-Z’s album a second life, the Grey Album had the unexpected consequence of introducing a generation of hip hop fans to the Beatles.

So while it may live on in legal textbooks and high school classrooms, pseudo-plagiarism in the public realm is becoming increasingly acceptable in many circumstances. If all content is partially plagiarized then surely nothing is truly original. And if nothing is truly original then we might as well embrace sharing and collaboration as a means to a greater end. The notion that plagiarism, no matter how slight, is a crime to be prosecuted will live on through the efforts of overzealous companies and misguided artists, but hopefully, it will diminish in significance as online communities and technology work to shift the paradigm.

A number of startups are paving the way to collaborative content creation online. Jumpcut is a collaborative video production site where people can upload, remix and share their pictures and videos. MusicShake is a music mixing service that lets users create their own professional quality music using online tools. Kaltura enables users to do with video, audio, and animation what wikis have enabled them to do with text. Even the big guys are taking notice; AOL runs Ficlets, a story collaboration website and is launching a multimedia story telling service called Bluestring. And of course, our very own MixedInk intends to contribute to this space in the coming months.

The poet Audre Lorde once said, “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” And that really encapsulates this movement. It is not about taking someone else’s work and calling it your own. It is about taking disparate works, and changing, adding, and re-mixing them to reflect your voice, then presenting it back to the community to continue on its promiscuous path, hopefully affecting people and making itself felt along the way. In this journey, MixedInk hopes to lead the way.

The author of this post is an advisor to MixedInk.

Just a quick post to draw your attention to a recent piece in The New Republic. It highlights the fact that for some topics, Wikipedia’s combination of a strict neutral point of view policy and its dependence on the wiki platform results in articles that leave something to be desired. (No, this is not about its occasional – way overblown – inaccuracies!) We were pleased to see the author, Douglas Wolk, practically arguing for the type of complementary writing tool we are developing.

Wolk explains why Wikipedia isn’t the perfect venue for reporting on politics and other potentially controversial topics. Here’s an excerpt:

Graceful writing takes a distant second place to neutrality. The language of the “Plame affair” article, like a lot of Wikipedia, is flatly declarative, not particularly quotable and occasionally afflicted with wobbly construction… And so the entry is an obstacle course of little infelicities and colorless clots of subclauses, from the first paragraph’s factual but pace-dragging citation of Joe Wilson’s memoir The Politics of Truth to the concluding section, headlined “Other perspectives on the CIA leak scandal,” which reads (following a link to “Alternate theories regarding the CIA leak scandal”) in its entirety: “Since the CIA leak scandal became public knowledge, commentators began presenting multiple and often highly-contested perspectives on it in various media.” You don’t say.

To make a case for how the parts of the Plame tzimmes fit together is, unavoidably, to make a political argument. That’s antithetical to the Wikipedia ethos, whose dedication to unvarnished facts is worthy of Dickens’s Mr. Gradgrind. Without some kind of thesis behind it, “Plame affair” is a dehydrated feast, a 20,000-word catalogue of notes and quotations and factoids that all have some bearing on the case in question but aren’t weighted for significance, have no particular narrative thread, and don’t begin to explain the meaning of the whole thing. It’s hard to imagine a Wikipedia that could function any other way, but the Internet hive-mind, negotiating in good faith and carefully hammering out compromise language, has done exactly what it was supposed to do–and failed anyway. The article, for all its catholic precision, isn’t actually useful, because it’s almost impossible to read… Wikipedia, friends, is boring.

Wolk hits the nail on the head. Generally speaking, and especially when it comes to controversial subjects, writers must make value judgments – whether writing individually or collectively. They must convey the order, context, and relative importance of an article’s components in order to sculpt narrative, digestible prose. As a tool, the wiki simply lacks the capacity to aggregate value judgments from a large number of contributors.

As regular readers of this blog know, this capacity is one of the central distinctive features of the MixedInk platform. We will allow contributors to focus not only on content, but also on style – which can be just as important in getting a point across.

(For more on how we intend to improve on the wiki, see this earlier post.)

If Miles Davis were here today, we bet he’d be proud of the part he played in inspiring the current internet movement. From unconferences to open source software, musical tendencies have been interwoven in what has come to be called “web2.0.”

Jazz musicians are masters at improvisation to the point of seeming telepathic. Pre-written music and carefully crafted songs are catalysts for experimentation, not ends in themselves. Musicians also seek to blur the line between the audience and presenter and build a community around their concerts, with the belief that increased participation will enrich the experience as well as the music. And we cannot forget the open source movement pioneered by the Grateful Dead – the band encouraged taping of concerts, with the only rule being that tapers could not sell tapes for profit.

On the internet today, we similarly seek new avenues for collaboration that allow for cumulative creativity and the ability to use others’ ideas as springboards. Where jam sessions are an ‘aggregation tool’ for musicians, the web 2.0 movement seeks its own mechanisms with which to speak with one voice and capture collective wisdom. We see quintessential web 2.0 websites like Digg and Facebook dependent upon a symbiosis among community members not so different from the connection between musicians in a band. And at an “unconference,” blurred lines between the audience and presenter and a belief in improvisation allows anyone to present and the whole group to decide which subjects will be covered on the fly.

Such unstructured and decentralized solutions to otherwise complicated problems (such as planning a multi-day conference) has become the basis for the next step in the evolution of the internet. The MixedInk collaborative writing platform is inspired by the world of music. It allows people to come together spontaneously and fluidly to improvise and innovate, build on and improve upon what has already been started, and create a unified output that reflects the energy and nuanced views of each of its participants.