Collaboration tools are popping up like gophers on a spring day. The latest tool to emerge that has caught my attention is SwarmTeams. From their site:
The Community Engagement Tool - inspired by nature.

Discover how you can enlist your key audiences - consumers, fans, citizens, staff, members or delegates - and transform them into proactive [...]

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An excerpt from ‘The Thin Book of Naming Elephants‘ :
In their book Execution, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan estimate that 40 percent of an effective leader’s time is spent on people issues. They point out that: “This immense personal commitment is time-consuming and fraught with emotional wear and tear in giving feedback, conducting [...]

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If you needed proof that there is such a thing as collaborative intelligence - you only have to take a peek at how our bodies coordinate themselves. This excerpt from Ervin Laszlo’s ‘Science and the Akashic Field‘ makes the point much better than I could.
‘In a complex organism the challenge of order is gigantic. [...]

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As much as collaboration is a great thing and working within groups enriches us - sometimes we have to work alone and I tripped over this piece about working alone that I thought I’d share. It comes from Steven’s Pressfield’s ‘The War of Art’ ( by the way the rest of the book is [...]

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The open source approach literally transformed the software industry and in turn had a huge impact on just about any aspect of life touched by technology. I am so committed personally to the open source community - I published my book ‘Teaching an Anthill to Fetch‘ under a Creative Commons licence, rather than the the [...]

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Anyone who read my book ‘Teaching an Anthill to Fetch‘ will know that I have a fondness for these little critters. In my view they offer a promise of how selfless we may actually become as a species- given enough time. An article in the NY Times is a fascinating peek into the ways [...]

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This fascinating little video by Deepak Chopra provides a peek into the deeply collaborative nature of our bodies. What a wonderful universe we live in, and how much more we have to learn about how it works.

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A team that has to work partially or solely electronically - using Internet and telephony based tools are becoming more common. These teams are often made up of individuals living in different time zones and often on different continents. As you can imagine this arrangement brings its own challenges. If distributed work teams have not [...]

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Part of developing our collaborative intelligence is increasing our ability to pull the right kind of information towards us. Visiting the right blogs is an excellent way to remain at least ‘on the curve’ - it’s getting increasingly difficult to actually get ahead of it.
BlogRovR is a great way to collect all your favorite and [...]

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I have been arguing that ‘collaboration’ as a word has become hijacked by the software development community. Yet for collaboration to occur there has to be a spirit of collaborative intelligence present in the human beings using the software. Not many software developers mention much about this dimension of the topic. Maybe because it is [...]

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