Collaboration

Recently, I joined a number of luminaries for the launch of the 4th Digital Media Learning (DML) competition, Badges for Lifelong Learning. Digital Learning Badges are online tools that recognize, measure, and support lifelong learning.

Here at Forum One, we love helping organizations make real progress on some of the world’s most pressing issues — education, poverty, the environment, global health, and international development (to name just a few). More often than not, a key to making that progress is connecting the thinkers, doers, influencers, and decision makers that have a stake in the world, and the initiative to change it. 

This Friday at 8:00 a.m. I will be chatting with Gary Vaughn on The Collaboration Tech Talk Show over on BlogTalkRadio.com.

I had a chance to catch up with Tim Bonnemann of Intellitics.com. During our conversation, he mentioned how much of the recent focus of "open government" has been on transparency and open data, and he sees less attention to online consultations and online participation. And some of the high-profile consultation experiments that have been tried have not gone so well. For example, see "How the Open Government Dialogue got slimed."

Our clients are planning, designing, and launching online professional networks of all shapes and sizes to reach, engage, and inform external stakeholders.

These range from private blogs to share privileged information and invite input; to online communities around face-to-face events; to project and partner collaboration; to communities of practice focused on specific topics. Since the technology landscape changes so fast, here's our current short-list of go-to platforms that we use to support our clients for these activities.

So, you've decided to invest in a tool for collaboration and content management. Great! And you are ready to begin. Even better.

I recently attended the Communications Network 2010 Conference. The event was very interesting, and I particularly enjoyed the discussion on crowdsourcing. Following the event, I posted my thoughts about crowdsourcing, an increasingly popular and effective practice for spurring new ideas and innovation, on the Communications Network blog. I am now cross-posting it here to share with our readers.

Those of us who sell strategy services for a living tend to rely on the desire for measured approaches to big problems. This taps into deep-seated wisdom about how to manage large, complex situations: plan first, then execute. Heck, our language is littered with support for this view. "Look before you leap" is a cherished nugget. "His approach is 'ready, fire, aim'" is used as a criticism, as is "flying by the seat of one's pants." There is a deep desire to instill deliberation in the face of big efforts.

There’s been an exciting development in online collaboration this month with GSA’s launch of Challenge.gov – a platform for Federal agencies to conduct challenges and contests.

For years, we have been advising clients on how to build, manage, and grow successful online communities. In these engagements, we have relied on our mantra, "people first, technology second," encouraging our clients to focus their energy on providing useful content, facilitating sharing, and connecting people, and to avoid a disproportionate focus on technology questions. This hasn't changed.