Soda - Keeping Curious

Imagine coming across a village where everyone was commited to helping each other out, and where each relied on the other in some small way to get by in life. Repairs to houses and farm buildings are done quickly and efficiently as people give-up their free time between other tasks to lend a hand, if only to mix-up a bit of cement or donate a few surplus bricks. Education within the village community is often in the form of passed on widsom, with children encouraged to learn things ‘hands on’ and to discuss new ways of promoting greater efficiency; seeing as they will one day inherit their parents tasks.

You can’t help but notice that the villagers are always popping round to each others house, often unannounced, but always welcomed to stay and have a drink or something to eat, but mostly to chat about the day’s events, or the outlook for the next few days, and how well the new school they’re all buidling is getting on.

Being self-sufficent as a community they have learned to recycle every useable thing. The crops benefit from being fed grade A compost, tools are held in high esteem and therefore kept in good order, and good husbandry makes sure that the livestock are well managed and sustainable. Villagers often remark that being part of the community makes them feel as if they were part of a larger, living thing that doesn’t exactly govern their lives but rather helps to maintain that delicate balance between having free choice and feeling part of a strong group dynamic, that provides them with the strength and optimism to know that their way of life is a ‘good life’.

Impressed by what your witnessing and curious to know just where you are, you retrace your steps back to the village limits to
note its name on the sign. Written upon it, in large black letters is the word WEB.

For the last week-and-a-half I’ve been focused on writing a presentation, which turns out to be a 60 slide eulogy to the virtues of mass collaboration. I say ‘turns out’ because I’ve ended up at a different place to my intended one. Things often happen like that. And it feels as if the light’s gone on. Collaboration topics such as collective intelligence, self-organising, ‘wisdom of the crowds’, wiki workplace and open source, have all fallen into place in my mind, sweet words that seem to flag an energing trend that’s only now beginning to get on the corporate radar.

Like the development of the web itself, there seems to be a serendipitous force working here. For instance, I’m was in a bookstore the other day (no news there) when I , ‘by chance’, came across a couple of recently published books on the subject of mass collaboration, one of which is ‘WE-THINK’ BY Charles Leadbeater. (I’m 30 pages in at the moment, and really enjoying his style and insight). The point is, you think you’ve discovered something new, having unearthed a gem of a subject, ‘the quarrel of the age’, only to find it popping up all over the place. I’ve decided this is due to that old adage ‘Great minds think alike’. Where as ‘Wikinomincs’ and ‘WE-THINK’ introduces us to the mass collaboration phenomena, and it’s early exponents, I want to take this subject out to brands, as a way of getting them to start to work with the notion that reaching outside of their organisation can have unseen, positive consequences.

Having finished the initial presentation, I’m using all that thinking and converting it into a workshop. I want to create sessions that looks at the future of collaboration on the web, the wiki workplace and how we can bring self-organising teams together to develop new products and services. So I’m in the market to hear from anyone out there with some great examples, suggestions or ideas regarding collaboration that I can feedback into the workshop process. I’m also looking to bring in people who are currently working in a collaborative way to achieve a goal; be it in science, medicine or the corporate environment. So if that sounds of interest then I’d love to hear what you’re up to. Using collaboration to create the mother of collaborative workshops, seems, well, the best way of creating a collaborative workshop. So let’s collaborate, and you could well end-up with your own collaborative workshop product that gets others collaborating.