“The Participate/Collaborate summit offers participants a delicious confluence of creative and practical leading edge thinkers, artists, and practitioners from across North America and around the globe. In terms of catalyzing innovation and making enduring useful connections, it doesn’t get any better.”

~ Jon Husband, Founder, Wirearchy

The Banff New Media Institute has held a series of summits on collaboration. This year, we focused on participatory design and social networks. “Collaboration” is used to describe a large set of current experiences and forms of organization, from multi-player games, to community blogs, to high performance computing grids. Is collaboration a new term for simply working together, or can it mean something more - the potential for new ideas, forms of social organization and even new discoveries?

Blogging and social networks are just two expressions of the ongoing peer-to-peer revolution and a clear indication that audiences are now participants. Expanding wireless capabilities enable ad hoc networks, location aware devices and semantic maps. Links are the currency of the present. Values are expressed through decentralized collective will. Participatory design, which is, working with the end-user to create a new product or process, is a growing approach in new media production. This summit considered the ways that individuals and groups are included and engaged through collaborative and participatory structures.

What are participatory design methods? Can participatory design ensure a market for products? What economies and rights models work in collaborative creation? Can we link peer-to-peer systems to more traditional forms of organization or media?

This summit also launched an international collaboration studies network.

“The Banff New Media Institute is a haven for cross-disciplinary work and collaboration. It is the fibre that connects minds from multiple fields around the world.”

~ Vera Roberts, Research Officer
Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto

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