Greetings from Picnic, a crossmediaweek that took place last week in Amsterdam!
The third Picnic was dedicated to the collaborative creativity, popular theme in today's content industry.
First day's keynote was We think: the power of mass creativity,  by Charles Leadbeater. Leadbeater referred to the Youtube cineasts and carage Kubricks as pebble throwers. These pebbles create only small ripples on the media surfaces but they have a growing importance in numbers. A big pile of pebbles can mount up to a large boulder.
Leadbeater pointed out that collaborative creativity requires a degree of hierarchy. The motives for anyone to join a structured community are diversity, shared sense of purpose, individual pay off and an opportunity to work with other people.
The most visible of this year's green theme was Dutch Postcode lottery competition for the best green idea or product. Out of the four finalists the jury awarded a half a million euros to a product from Evocative Design in New York. Greensulate is a building insulation panel which is made of agricultural bi-products. This is then combined with cellulose from fungi to grow your own building material! Sounds terrific.

The sheep market by Aaron Koblin

Koplin presented his project where, with the aid of Amazonin task distributor, thousands of people drew images of a sheep for a fee of a few eurosents. The sheep were then grouped into data representing patterns.
Koblin also showed a demo of New York Talk Exchange. This program shows, in real time, all telecoms traffic in and out of Manhattan. One easily predictable item was the red hot peaks of SMS traffic during New Years Eve!
According to Koblin, these data visualisations help us to see important nodule points from which to design new ways  of human interaction.  
Next autumn Wesertgaasfabriek, the old gas works will act again as the picnic grounds. But well before that, actually, next week, we will meet at Mindtrek, in Tampere! See you here!