Charles Leadbeater is one of the world’s leading thinkers on innovation and creativity. A former journalist, he has spent the last five years examining how the production of content is changing, and especially how audiences are adapting to the introduction of new ways of accessing “stuff”. He’s been intrigued by “swarms of innovation”, looking at what motivates huge numbers of people to collaborate intensively together, often driven by passion than money, to create encyclopaedias, open source software programmes, and virtual games.
The English-language part of Wikipedia reached 3 million articles in August 2009, with around 1300 being added every month by volunteer editors. The site generates up to 60,000 page requests a second. No-one predicted this business model of collaboration.

"The emerging media platforms invite us to think and act with people, rather than for them, on their behalf or even doing things to them”. says Leadbeater. “The web is an invitation to connect with other people with whom we can share, exchange and create new knowledge and ideas. That has implications for the role of public service media in our societies”.

The rise of what has become known as Web 2.0 is based on a set of important changes in people’s relationship to information and to one another. Barriers to entry into creating media content are falling. It is becoming much easier for people to create small packages of content, often by downloading tools available on the web. The web makes it easier for people to publish and distribute this content through a myriad of channels such as YouTube, Hyves, Facebook and Slideshare.

In fact, there are so many platforms out there, some people are talking about “clouds” of content, where the information no longer resides in a single place. If you use Google Mail you’re already trusting your content to the cloud.

In his NPOX Keynote in Hilversum on November 16th 2009, Leadbeater will ask whether the skies above the Netherlands will be dominated by just one “Google”cloud of content, or will there be lots of clouds, including a big one containing public broadcasters’content? How can collaboration by the audience really feed creativity of professional programme makers? Why is leadership by the broadcasters going to be important? I asked Leadbeater to elaborate on his thinking prior to his appearance in Hilversum.