We all know that ‘top down’ doesn’t work, but we all complain that trying to create change from the bottom up can often feel futile. Which is probably why revolutions so often resort to using violence.

Thanks to a tweet from @Damiano this morning, I found myself reading the Guardian article: People power transforms the web in next online revolution which is based on Charles Leadbeater’s book “We Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production”. An acclaimed thinker on technology, Leadbeater explains how net users are, by banding together, changing every aspect of our lives.

And those ‘net users’ are us. So the way I see it is, we have not just the opportunity, but the responsibility to bring about change in our society and the way we run our businesses and the way our children are educated, from the bottom up, but with one BIG difference.

What the net allows, and encourages, is collaboration. A few disgruntled cititzens are going to have trouble changing government policy, but Political ‘flash mobs’ have already swung elections in Spain, the Philippines twice and South Korea, by collaborating on mass via the Internet.

The US is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on a war to bring democracy to Iraq. Yet only 4 per cent of people in the Arab world have broadband access. The most potent way to promote democracy in the Middle East would be to get that figure above 50 per cent.

If ingenious games designers can inspire thousands of people to collaborate to solve a puzzle, could we do something similar to tackle global warming, keep communities safe, provide support for the elderly, help disaster victims, lend and borrow money, conduct political and policy debates, teach and learn, design and make physical products?

My laptop only runs Ubuntu (Windows Professional XP died and I’ve not yet bothered to get it fixed). Ubuntu is a free open source operating system from Linux, with no need for virus protection because it’s so well built and constantly updated for free.

The Linux community is the most impressive example of sustained ‘We Think’. A version of Linux released in June 2005 had 229 million lines in its source code that would have taken 60,000 man-years to develop at a cost of perhaps $8bn. Every day most people who use the web rely on open source: Google’s servers run on Linux; most websites rely on servers running the open-source Apache program. Open source could in time provide a model for other areas of life, for example turning We Think into We Make.

The part of the article that most caught my attention was this: “If we could persuade 1 per cent of Britain’s pupils to be player-developers for education, that would be 70,000 new sources of learning. But that would require us to see learning as something more like a computer game, something that is done peer-to-peer, without a traditional teacher.”

Having home schooled in the past, I know that learning is a collaborative process, if any real learning is to take place. I remember a staunch resistance from my daughter Cydney at my ‘lesson plan’ – so we chucked that idea and I asked her what SHE wanted to learn about. She wanted to make cakes. She did a lot of cooking, and learnt to read (cookery books), maths (measuring), science and nutrition – even geography and history can be drawn in around the kinds of foods you are creating (she was keen on making different breads too).

Apart from already cooking whole meals aged 11 while mummy is ‘too busy’ on the computer, Cyd is like most children – naturally keen to learn and share. Somehow many of us lose that natural urge as we grow older, and people new to the idea of open source software look aghast and confused at why anyone would create something for no direct payment and then give it away. In the same way many business people are still scared of the ‘danger’ of online social networking, sharing personal stuff, being helpful to other professionals without a contra-deal in place.

And yet big corporations understand that communication and collaboration are key to creativity and growth, which is one of the reasons why companies like Deloitte encourage employees to use Facebook groups.

How about this for a rebel action….. hang around outside schools giving out wifi enabled internet mobile phones and encourage the kids to create their own curriculum via a wiki? Maybe some have already started?

I am currently researching a sustainability policy for CertainShops by collaborating with others, like Sam Wilson of EcoEvents and Lorraine Bell of Simply CSR. It has been suggested by a commenter on one of my blogs to put out the draft as a wiki so others can collaborate and we can share the results, encouraging many small businesses to create their own policies.

Watch this space…..

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