We’ve seen the process repeat itself quite a few times: someone reads Wikinomics, gets really excited about mass collaboration, self-organization, and user-generated content, and believes that all they have to do is start the first webpage/community site/wiki “to collaboratively create (pick your target)” and everything will take care of itself. When it doesn’t, they wonder what went wrong – and might just jump to the conclusion that the whole wikinomics thing just doesn’t work.

What these people fail to understand is that wikinomics isn’t just some massive free-for-all where a miracle simply appears. The power of mass collaboration must be balanced with some form of organizational (and perhaps expert driven) structure in order to create success. One can easily see this by looking at what the “elder statesmen” such as Linux and wikipedia did, as well some more recent developments like A Million Penguins from last year – which was promoted as what would be the first collaboratively written novel. This story covers the problems that came up nicely, some adaptions that were made, some theories why it didn’t work, what could be tried now, etc.

The ongoing challenge for wikipedia (as I referenced last month), Penguin, and everyone else interested in harnessing the power of mass collaboration is figuring out exactly how to strike that balance. There is no single answer for what is right, and it can vary on a case-to-case basis. What makes this current period of time so interesting is all the experimentation that is going on – which brings us to how Nokia’s getting tied up with a Spike Lee joint.

Yesterday Nokia announced a new venture in multimedia film production, in conjunction with the famous producer. There’s kind of an advertising gimmick underlying the whole thing where an entire movie is going to be shot using mobile phones, but I’m far more interested in the balance that they are trying to strike – a self-organizing system imbedded within an expert-led production structure.

As the article notes, the central theme of the film will evolve around a theme of humanity, similarly the way music tells the story of humanity. The film will be broken out into three acts. Act the start of each act Spike Lee will announce the assignment, and people will have four weeks to show if they’ve got game.

Spike Lee is acting as the main director, guide and critique. Nokia assistant directors act as a form of intermediary, selecting a top-25 from all the submissions, and site visitors then vote to name the top-10. Then Lee will do the right thing, and select from this top-10 what gets integrated into the final film that he puts together.

Will it work? No one can be sure, but I am quite hopeful. I imagine that there are an extraordinary number of budding filmmakers that will capture some amazing stuff, and Spike Lee will have a unique genius in putting it together – so it seems like an interesting combination, and one that probably has more potential than just a “simple” mass collaboration. Of course, it would be even better if the selected contributors (among others) got an equity stake in the film…