Promoting social creativity: a component of a national initiative for social participation

This panel will discuss group processes that promote social creativity in science, engineering, arts, and humanities. We will offer positive and negative examples of social creativity projects, while suggesting research directions for dramatically increased social participation. The goal is to develop strategies that would expand resources and opportunities for research and education in social creativity. This requires our community to develop a unified position, then reach out to national science funding agencies, while building the case for the importance of this topic beyond our own community. How can social creativity, collaborative discovery, distributed innovation, and collective intelligence be framed as an international priority to cope with the problems of the 21st century and how can we identify a clear set of research challenges? The theme of technology-mediated social participation is outlined in the white paper for a National Initiative for Social Participation (http://iparticipate.wikispaces.com). The white paper suggests that successful research challenges should have three key elements: (1) compelling national need (healthcare, national security, community safety, education, innovation, cultural heritage, energy sustainability, environmental protection, etc.), (2) scientific foundation based on established theories and well-defined research questions (privacy, reciprocity, trust, motivation, recognition, etc.), and (3) computer science research challenges (security, privacy protection, scalability, visualization, end-user development, distributed data handling for massive user-generated content, network analysis of community evolution, cross network comparison, etc.). We seek recommendations for ways to increase the resources and attention for this field. We hope to inspire: universities to change course content, add courses, and offer new degree programs industry to help researchers on social creativity government to support these ideas and try them out in government applications scientists and artists to open themselves to more social/collaborative approaches