Thoughts on open source writing… with responsibility!

In a sweet moment of downtime earlier today, I snuck in a little WIRED Web site reading. Halfway through Kristin Gorski’s article “Creative Crowdwriting: The Open Book”—which focuses mainly on Penguin Books’ recent Wiki-novel experiment A Million Penguins—I stopped to muse on the “writing without responsibility” impression of such an activity as expressed by love-her-or-hate-her Canadian authoress Margaret Atwood, who reportedly participated in the five-week writing process…

Author Margaret Atwood participated, said [Penguin's Digital Publisher] Jeremy Ettinghausen, and “said that it was a lot of fun, but that it was writing without responsibility. So I think it allowed people to be quite free in how they wrote, and that was the whole idea…that it was anonymous and crowd-led, rather than ego-led.”

Did she mean to imply that all crowdwriters diving in and making their mark on the epic did so without any of the stereotypical angst associated with creation? That because this was not a book written by a lonely chain-smoker in Paris but by thousands of online personas, true to their real-life counterparts or not, few likely feared the repercussions of their typing? And if so, why? What is it about open source creativity that offers a safeguard, or alternatively, a reason to put in just a little less because someone else will fix it?

Our fair blog sees a different mix of users posting every day. Granted, we don’t number in the thousands—or anywhere close—and we are indeed credited for our individual posts, but we are still a group of separate people contributing to an open blog. Why do we not raise the flag to Ms Atwood’s flippancy and renounce all responsibility for our words, fictional or not?

I believe, and I’d like to continue believing, that the reason for our care and our effort—and please feel free to read “our” as “my” if you so choose—is because such contribution, whether in the to-the-minute 21st century sense of open source software or crowdwriting or in a rather ridiculous and loose interpretation (think about how you’d feel if you were the one person to not stand up and do the wave in the entire stadium!), is almost inherent. We contribute and share our experiences because we would shrivel up and wither away if we didn’t. Despite the lonely image often associated with computer use, the slave to technology with a day-old coffee mug and a USB key chained to her wrist, and the growing numbers of tasks we can now do solo, we crave collaboration. We respect teamwork. And even if we have well-defined roles, we are eager to share our knowledge, whatever knowledge, with whoever gives us the chance.

So we care about our participation. We slam our hearts onto the screen with every word and—sorry Ms Atwood—we feel responsible for our opinions, not because they’re our own individually, but because they become ours in a collective sense.