The tech world is just now introducing a new word into its vocabulary: “Waves.” If you have heard the term, then it probably was in conjunction with Google, as in “Google Wave.” But there are other more elastic ways to use the term - as in “Next Agenda Waves.” With that in mind, let’s step through the basics.

 

 

For the last couple years Google has put a crack team on a high profile project whose initial mission was to reinvent email from the bottom up. What would happen if you invented email today, 40 years after the fact, knowing all the things we can do on the Internet now? 

 

You would try to design a tool that would enable much more sophisticated interaction between people and allow them to collaborate with much more efficiency. At the very least, all the maddening problems with group work on email – like document version control, or getting a new participant up-to-speed – would get fixed. At best, you would come up with a whole new way for large numbers of people to work productively and with complexity online. 

 

Google came out of the process hitting the higher mark with a new online platform called Google Wave. On a technical level, Wave integrates many if not most of the key tools of the web in one platform. You get the capabilities of discussion groups, and wikis, and instant messaging, and others in one integrated environment. Google also added capability that was not yet invented like a playback feature that allows new participants to step through all the developments that have gone before. Most importantly, Google allows developers to create Apps, like Apple does on its iPhone platform, that can continuously improve and refine the collaborative experience. 

 

 

Google does not consider “waves” as proprietary. They fully expect other companies and organizations to build off the open protocol and come up with their own versions of waves. In that way, think of “wave” like email: no one company owns email. But many companies developed email clients that can pass generic email back and forth between other email clients. The same is expected from waves. That’s that technical way to think about waves. 

 

Waves can also be understood more metaphorically, as in “waves of collaborative work.” When real people in the real world want to solve real problems, they don’t care about the tools per se. They want to just do the work. If they can do the work more effectively and efficiently with waves, then great. 

We think waves do offer the best way currently available to do sophisticated collaborative work online. We also expect that experience to keep continuously improving with the might of Google behind their version of them and the explosion of innovation happening in the developers’ community around Apps. It’s the right foundation to build on for the long haul.

 

 

Next Agenda builds on the Google Wave foundation to customize our own collaboration platform for attacking complex challenges. We use the word “Wave” not in the technical but the metaphorical sense. 

 

A Next Agenda Wave is an evolving body of collaborative work. We initiate key waves that might continue to build and build over a long time. But we make it easy for our network members to fork off the main waves, initiate their own specific waves, and keep carrying out the complex conversations and collaborative work needed to actually solve big challenges. 

 

Waves are not the easiest tools to understand at first. They are relatively complex because they allow complex interactions more like what happens in face-to-face meetings. But we need to operate at that more complex level if we expect to actually solve complicated challenges like how to shift to clean energy, let alone how to fully solve climate change. We can’t tweet our way to solving global warming. We need tools like waves. Now we have them. Let the innovation begin.