A bit more about Me:
My documentary film What are we doing here?
My wife's store Yellow Threads
My brother's TV show The Perennial Plate
My Google Profile
My Calendar
My Facebook Friends
bk@brandonklein.com
Work:brandon.klein@optum.com
A small achievement in relative terms, but still an incredibly valuable resource for the best collaboration related sites from around the web.
Check them out. From Collaboration software to collaborative ways to stay healthy to collaborating crowdsourcers and designers. It is all here: http://www.delicious.com/collaborationking
We rarely talk about the chemical side of collaboration, but it is probably one of the most important factors for your collaboration success. Here are two relatively recent examples that need to be shared.
1. Coffee CSA - This is one of the best examples of collaboration. Not only because of the way it connects businesses and consumers, but because it is arguably one of the most effective ways of collaboratively combating poverty. Spending $20 a month on coffee buying direct from an Ethiopian farmer is probably (can anyone prove this? Cash reward offered!) more effective that $2,000 cash to any charity claiming to do good work in the same geographic region.
+ One farmer's fair trade sustained income can keep a family of 10 out of food assistance for life
- The average charity project is 3 years
+ An employed farmer can buy books and uniforms to send his/her kids to school for life
- The average charity projects is just 3 years
+ The average farmer needs to transport his product and therefore supports roads and commerce
- The average charity has their own SUV's for foreigners to visit
The coffee CSA literally lets you choose which farmer you want to buy your beans from. They are then delivered every month to satisfy your caffeinated persuasion. This particular CSA just made it big time in the NY Times.
2. There have been some pretty substantial reports/studies into the effectiveness of coffee. Here is an inforgraphic well worth looking at. This is a chart from the Canadian Department of National Defense that depicts the effectiveness of the little bean on soldiers in action. Pretty amazing!
The effects of 200 mg of caffeine versus either a placebo or a non treatment control condition on target detection response time over 3 hours of a simulated sentry duty task. From Johnson and Merullo, 2000.
At a recent NEN E-Leader Workshop for leaders of Entrepreneurship Cells on college campuses, I used a version of theLow-Tech Real-Life Social Networking Gamefrom the excellent new book ‘GameStorming: A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebreakers, and Changemakers‘ by Dave Gray, Sunni Brown and James Macanufo.
The objective of the game was to explain how online social networks can help entrepreneurs form new connections by discovering and becoming more discoverable to potential collaborators who share their passions.
Here’s how I organized the game:
Step 1. I divided the 5o odd participants into two groups and gave each group a white board.
Step 2: I asked each participant to write their name and three things they are passionate about on a post-it note and put it up on their group’s white board in a random order.
Step 3: Then, I then asked each participant to compare their “passion-tags” with the tags for their group members and draw a line if the tags match, without moving the post-it notes.
Step 4: Finally, I asked the participants to look at the network of post-it notes and lines on the white boards and share their observations on what they learned from the game.
The participants learned several important insights about online social networks from the game –
1. Each one of us is connected to everyone else, only by a few degrees of separation. In the small groups, the maximum degree of separation was three, but even in large social networks, the maximum degree of separation is believed to be six.
2. Some people are more connected than others, because they have broad passions that are shared by many others, or because they spent more time making connections with others with similar passions. For instance, the person who had the highest number of connections in one group has spent time to read through the passion-tags of each person in the group.
3. When people declare their passions publicly, they discover and become discoverable to others who share their passions. Otherwise, they miss out on opportunities to make new connections, even in the same room. For instance, several participants in one group discovered that their shared a passion for cooking after the game.
4. Serendipity plays an important role in declaring passions and discovering connections, so we need catalysts to discover people who share the same passion. For instance, one participant had mentioned graphic design as a passion, but hadn’t make any connections, until I mentioned it and several people said they shared his passion for graphic design, but hadn’t mentioned it as a passion-tag.
5. Once we discover others who share our passions, we are more inclined to like them and collaborate with them, even if we have known them in another context before. For instance, several participants were pleasantly surprised to discover that there were other gamers in the room.
6. In an interesting twist, some post-it notes fell off the white boards and some participants remarked that this was similar to people becoming inactive or leaving social networks, leading to broken connections. So, social networks are not static and both people in our networks and the passions we share with them are constantly changing.
In a one hour session, I spent 15 minutes in setting the context, 15 minutes in playing the game, and 30 minutes in discussion.
It seems to me that whenever I put aside my slide decks and use storytelling or games instead, I enjoy my workshops more (and the participants seem to learn more).
What about you? What are the most innovative games you have played in workshops you have hosted or attended? Do share your insights in the comments below?
Gaurav Mishra is a collaboration master who helps global brands integrate Purpose, Participation and Profits, as Director, Digital and Social Media, MSLGROUP Asia. He originally wrote about the low tech social network on his award winning blog.
The consultant of the future will have to possess characteristics not considered standard in today’s… PowerPoint, hide behind email and corporate hierarchies.
1) Flexible to a fault
2) Listening between the lines
3) Swiss Army style tech and social expert BUT specialized expertise
4) Personal branding
o Online tracking like your phone
5-10 will be covered next week…
5) Pretend PowerPoint
6) Fun is paramount
7) Data visualization
8) Quirk, uniqueness, excel point OR detail master
9) Long term goal-oriented
Read more at PSFK
Egyptian revolution visualized
You might have heard of Tim Burton's Twitter collective storytelling using twitter. But probably not, because it wasn't that good. Maybe you heard about what your nephew had for breakfast on Twitter. But you probably didn't care. But, then again, you probably heard about the revolutions happening in the Middle East/Africa. Twitter helped/is helping. Maybe? Well, at least a little bit.
Generally, you are right, most people roll there eyes at the mention of Twitter.
But here are 15 reasons you should pay attention to Twitter, regardless of what business you are in - interested in collaboration or not. Originally penned by the excellent Alan Rusbridger, they are well worth listening closely @too:
1) It's an amazing form of distribution
2) It's where things happen first
3) As a search engine, it rivals Google
4) It's a formidable aggregation tool
5) It's a great reporting tool
6) It's a fantastic form of marketing
7) It's a series of common conversations. Or it can be
8) It's more diverse
9) It changes the tone of writing
10) It's a level playing field
11) It has different news values
12) It has a long attention span
13) It creates communities
14) It changes notions of authority
15) It is an agent of change