I gave a talk at Seattle’s sixth Ignite: Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers. The text for the talk is below. A few folks were asking about the slides so I put them up on SlideShare here.

I read a book a while ago by Scott Berkun, Myths of Innovation, where he noted that inspiration is much more social than you might expect. “Group Genius” similarly reviewed recent research highlighting when groups can perform collaborative creative feats beyond the possibility of any individual.

That really got me thinking about how creativity plays out in my own life. Over the past ten or so years, I’ve been actively involved with community based creative projects on many levels: technology innovation teams, Dorkbot, throwing elaborately decorated fundraising events, large scale art installations, Burning man theme camps.

I decided to share some of the lessons I’ve learned through my reading, and working with community collaborations, for the Ignite audience because it is comprised largely of people for whom creativity or innovation is an important goal in their lives. Here is the verbage that went into the talk:

****** IGNITE April 2006: “Community Genius: Leveraging Community to Increase your Creative Powers.”

Raise your hand if being creative or innovative is an important goal in your life. [many raised hands]. Welcome to the creative class! Today I am going to be talking about how you can use your community to increase your creative powers. [Intro slide 1]

What is community? Community is a web of relationships with an ongoing exchange of information and support. Communities are characterized by a feeling of belonging or identity with the group as a whole. [Slide 2]

You don’t tend to think of community from a sociobiological perspective, but just as the feeling of love can lead to babies, so can a feeling of community lead to social capital — your access to social resources that help you thrive. [Slide 3]

Community groups are unique because they enable transitive relationships. That is, whether or not you know someone, by virtue of your common membership in the same community they are likely to trust you and share resources. [Slide 4]

Similarly, they can help you with the creative process. Creativity is much more social than you imagine. Think of it as taking a whole bunch of different ideas from the people around you, throwing them all into the air together, and then seeing if they land in an interesting pattern. Which leads me to the first tip. [Slide 5]

Tip #1. Seek diversity! To really leverage your community, you want to find people who are NOT LIKE YOU, they are groups or individuals with very different ideas or approaches to things. [Slide 6]

Tip #2. Seek a high rotation in weak social ties. It is usually through the social weak ties that you’ll be exposed to new ideas. Make a hobby out of continuously meeting new people. [slide 7]

Tip #3. Develop friends and colleagues with good “flow”. These are people who engage and challenge you, but are not threatening. You can completely lose your self-consiousness and immerse yourself in the creative experience. [Slide 8]

Tip #4. Get a whiteboard, and put it in the most social room in your hourse, which is often the kitchen. Stick to the #1 rule which is that anything can be erased at any time. You want to always leave room for new ideas! You can document by taking pictures. [Slide 9]

Tip #5. Play different roles, whether it’s passive observer, active participant, or leader. You will always get so much more about of a community by playing the role of leader, but you don’t have time to be a leader for more than one or two groups or projects. Nonetheless, you want to participate at least at the level of learning observation with a few groups. [Slide 10]

Tip #6. Play nice! Information spreads like wild-fire through community groups, so if you don’t play nice you’ll sour the whole community experience for you. It’s okay to be less active, but don’t over commit and then flake out. [Slide 11]

Tip #7. Hang out a lot in bars. Seriously. Conversation is the vehicle to innovative ideas, but you need conversation over time. Give yourself the opportunity to build on ideas through relaxed, casual conversation over many occasions. [Slide 12]

Tip #8. Give Away Ideas and Knowledge Freely. Tim Sanders wrote a book called Love is the Killer App, and suggests we all live the Love Cat Way. Essentially, the point is that the more you share, the more you get back, and you get it back exponentially as you empire of relationships grows. [Slide 13]

Tip #9. Play the “Yah and…” generative idea game. This is the game where you are brainstorming ideas, and rather than trying to replace or better the previous idea, you *build* on it. It is through the unique *combination* of ideas that innovation happens. [Slide 14]

Tip #10. Generate many ideas, but pick only the good ones to execute. You have been actively engaged in generating a lot of ideas, but while fun they are not always feasible to execute. Pick the ones that really combine your skills and passions in a unique way. Pick the ones that take into consideration your time and resources. [Slide 15]

Tip #11. Have a place. Once you have picked an idea, figure out a place where you can work together to make it happen. There’s a special magic, and an acceleration of ideas when you are in the room together. [Slide 16]

Tip #12. Have a project day. These are regularly scheduled days when you will all be there at the same time. You can’t rely just on serendipity to make sure you see each other often enough. I had one group called “art day”, where each month a new person would host an artistic medium in their house: we rotated through painting, wire sculpture, electronics, and so forth. It was great! [Slide 17]

Tip #13. Give up control. If you are successfully leveraging your community’s creativity, the ideas and projects will evolve in a direction you would never have developed in isolation. Embrace it! [Slide 18]

Here are some suggested groups and event as the intersection of creativity and technology. My favorite (aside from Ignite, of course) is Dorkbot. I highly recommend going to Burning Man at least once, think of it as a “creative communities boot camp.” [Slide 19]

This summer, we (dorkbot and friends) are hosting a one day event called FrayedWire: a mix of presentations, workshops, and discussions for people at the intersection of art and technology! This will be a great opportunity for you to meet and be inspired by the creative tech community. [Slide 20]