The alphabet is useful, like a commodity, but a beautiful typeface doesn’t often come from committees does it?

Creative collaboration isn’t what I consider “a crowd” nor is an open source community a committee.

I’m not sure I get the Dead Head reference. The Dead leveraged their crowds that were full of extremely creative people, but from a distance – they look like every other crowd.

I think the missed communication is in the difference between creative collaboration and committees; communities and crowds. One has creative freedom and one doesn’t.

Is the creation of the alphabet any less significant because it lacks a designated genius to attribute it to? Is sending a man to the moon less brilliant than the invention of geometry simply because we can’t point to an individual like Euclid? What was more brilliant: Jefferson’s prose or the Continental Congress’ creation? Was George Carlin more brilliant than Monty Python?

I’m just not convinced that one form of brilliance is more brilliant that the other?

Clearly, there is great brilliance in the individual–that should continue to be acknowledged and celebrated. But it simply doesn’t follow logically that the ‘crowd’ or a community or a movement of people can’t be brilliant too. I’m afraid the open source development community is ample proof that a community can be brilliant. Yet, within that same community individual participants such as Linus Torvald proves that attribution need not be an issue. Check out the Creative Commons.

As for the crowd being boring, mention that to any Dead Head and see what their response is.

Nah. I don’t think so.

After a bit of soul searching, I finally figured out a CD can have shelf full of copywriting awards and still suck as a creative director.

That stopped me cold. Maybe not the central point of your article, but a remarkable distillation of the way we often relate to people and experiences.

Thank you.