Last Sunday's Guardian has a piece about Penguin Books' experimental partnership with De Montfort University's online MA program in creative writing and new media. "They plan to create the world's first 'wiki' novel, fiction that will be concocted online by millions of contributors across the globe. Until the end of the month anyone can join in to help write the novel, which has the provisional title of A Million Penguins."
Gimmick or genuine collaboration? Could be both - and it will be an interesting experiment in creative collaboration, content management, wikipedia-style ethical questions and the possibility of weaving a cross-cultural tapestry of characters and events. Penguin says that they've been inundated with contributions and they're having a hard time keeping up with them.
And while there's a lot of online discussion about whether or not it's possible to write a collective novel, the level of participation indicates a real hunger for different ways to making art in collaboration with, rather than isolation from, a larger community. Something that goes a step further than sharing and rating solo videos and re-mixing multimedia content into a new piece.
Whatever the "quality" of the final product, it will not be a failure. Because of Penguin's marketing muscle, it's the most expansive experiment I'm aware of that uses social software to create a single, community-generated creative work. And whether or not wiki technology actually suits the process, the challenges are already highlighting the ways it could help creators and publishers drive the development of social media tools.
There's an interesting discussion on A Million Penguins at if:book.
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