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 advocates of your cause, community or product.
Like a lot of the new social networking and collaborative tools – at first glance it takes a few moments to catch onto what they are offering to do for us. However what caught my eye immediately was the concept of turning audiences into communities. Inspired by natural systems SwarmTeams promises much in terms of collaborative possiabilities.

You may have heard me mention in other posts that I am quite convinced that the traditional business model is changing so fast and so drastically that in a few years ‘communities’ will replace ‘brands’ and ‘community members’ will replace ‘consumers’. Social networking /marketing is one of the main forces behind this shift. SwarmTeams is a great concept – and well worth a visit – I would love to hear what others think about.

BlogRovR is a great way to collect all your favorite and important blogs in the one place – and so easy to use. With tools like BlogRovR we can really start ‘Getting Clever Together’.

The Defrag conference is described at their site as…. the first conference focused solely on the internet-based tools that transform loads of information into layers of knowledge, and accelerate the “aha” moment. Defrag is about the space that lives in between knowledge management, “social” networking, collaboration and business intelligence. Defrag is not a version number. Rather it’s a gathering place for the growing community of implementers, users, builders and thinkers that are working on the next wave of software innovation.

This sounds promising and I intend to check out on it’s proceedings to see if there is any mention of the ‘user issues’ involved in building collaboration.

“With the amount of information people are faced with, creating an environment where ideas and collaboration flourish is a challenge. Accumulated information can inadvertently contribute to confusion and overwhelm research teams, if the content isn’t presented intuitively,” said Sandy Ping, CEO of VentureForward.

This challenge has a huge impact on our ability to collaborate – whether we are a part of a small volunteer organization or a large international project team.

David Allen has mentioned on his blog that he is experimenting using it with tracking his Mind Manager maps. Maybe that is a little too much information for you. If you have used Mind Manager for creating mind maps you will realize that ‘Mapping you maps’ could be a very useful thing. Anyone who has Mind Manager loaded up and is interested in how to use it to develop a talk for example, can email me directly and I will send them a copy of a map I did recently on the topic of ‘The Use of Intuition in Business Decisions’ – you do have to have at least the demo version loaded for the file to be any good to you – so bear that in mind before you ask for it.

If you haven’t heard of either of these resources I highly recommend that you check them out. The immediate application to helping teams collaborate more effectively could be the creation of a mind map or personal brain for a project that required lots of peoples input. I’m sure you can think of a multitude of other applications though once you have taken a closer look at these collaboration tools. In fact used in specific ways, both these tools could be rightly described as ‘social software‘. And of course both are great ways to develop collaborative intelligence (or CQ as I call it) at either an individual or group level.

Thomas De Zengotita has written an interesting article about Second Life in the present (Oct 2007) issue of ‘What Is Enlightenment?‘ magazine. You can hear Thomas talk about the effects media is having on our consciousness at the WIE Site. Well worth a listen.

‘With the recent advent of the global Internet, it is only now that we humans are approaching the information exchange capacity that cyanobacteria communities have possessed for over 2 billion years on earth.’ (Margulis and Sagen, 1997, Fortey, 1997)

…and with the proliferation of social networking systems we are about to tap into that huge resource…I can’t wait to see what we will create.