John Winsor is a deeply creative guy; he does wonderful work applying the lens of design thinking and raw creativity to advertising. We are lucky enough to have him hanging around the d.school a bit lately, where he gave wonderful talk to the students in our Creating Infectious Action class, and yesterday, gave a great talk at our conference. His blog Cultural Radar is fantastic, check it out. I was intrigued by everything he told us yesterday, but especially taken with how he is revising one his books, now called Flipped: How Bottom-Up Co-creation is Replacing Top-Down Innovation. Check out his post about it. Reflecting the spirit of the book, he has the entire old book on a wiki and is inviting people to help him revise and update it. John told me yesterday that he has already had 75 people sign-up and help. So if you want to help co-author a book, check it out!
I wonder if this is the first crowdsourced book?
Update: Stephanie points out that it is not the first crowdsourced book, apparently that title belongs to We Are Smarter Then Me.
We-Think by Charles Leadbeater in the UK was done in a similar fashion, I think. I also recall him having to really work on the publisher to support the approach.
Posted by: Joseph Logan | May 03, 2009 at 04:18 AM
Bob -
Thanks for the props. It was great to be with you at Stanford on Thursday. It's always inspiring hanging out with the d.school crew. I look forward to continuing the dialogue.
John
Posted by: jtwinsor | May 02, 2009 at 11:00 AM
Just thought I'd mention that Lawrence Lessig's book Code used an open (I think) wiki to do the revision for the second edition a few years ago. Looks like details live here now: http://www.socialtext.net/codev2/index.cgi
I remember reading through the revisions at the time; it was very neat to see the depth of commentary! Flipped sounds like a cool project too.
Posted by: Phillip Kast | May 02, 2009 at 12:25 AM