A New Process:
Linking Offline and Online Worlds Via Video
The best way to solve the complex challenges of the 21st century is to leverage both the unique characteristics of face-to-face meetings and the equally powerful characteristics of online collaboration too. Next Agenda does just that - we link those previously separate worlds through an innovative use of video.
Innovative Meetings
Some pieces of solving complex problems require the focus and subtlety of physical meetings. For example, it’s much harder to get angry and walk away from a conversation when you are looking someone in the eye. And you can get a tremendous amount of work down when you constrain people in a room and focus them for a block of time.
Over the years many very effective “tools” or exercises have been developed to get smart, knowledgeable people to work in very productive and creative ways over concentrated periods of time. A whole field of meeting design and facilitation has evolved that has perfected methods to get groups to define problems, brainstorm ideas, prioritize the best of them, and make tough choices quickly and efficiently. For the last couple decades, global corporations and advanced government agencies have used these techniques to great effect.
Next Agenda draws off that body of work and has senior team members with deep experience in that field. We have developed our own approach to designing meetings with an eye to capturing it all on video and continuing the conversation online.
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Collaboration Online
Some things are best done, or can only be done, through collaboration online. The physical meetings must end but on the web the conversation can continue for weeks or months or longer. The web allows the numbers of participants to scale well beyond those who could possibly fit in a room. This scale and longevity allows groups to go into complicated issues with great detail and complexity.
Over the years a different set of design innovations has evolved best practices for online collaboration. The world has marveled at some of the most magnificent examples of this kind of work - like Wikipedia, where tens of thousands of people work in a parallel processes toward common goals.
Next Agenda draws off the best of what works in collaboration online and, in fact, has a senior team member who works with Wikimedia, the parent organization for Wikipedia. We make the difficult structural link between the previously separate worlds of advanced collaboration done between people online and in physical meetings.
Web Video
The key to the link between those two worlds is video. Video cameras and editing tools have become cheap enough to use in ways that never could have even been contemplated in the days of expensive television or movies. Moreover, an entire generation has grown up using these cheap tools and now the best of these young people are extremely adept at using them. The overall effect of these twin developments is that high-quality video is much more cost-effective and versatile than ever before and so you can be much more profligate in using it.
Next Agendas has developed a new way to immersively cover our physical gatherings to capture way more than what happens on the central stage. We send as many as half a dozen video journalists to cover all aspects of the gathering from what happens on the stage to conversations in the halls. We get into the minds of as many participants as possible through in-depth interviews in side rooms and quick check-ins on the floor. All the video shooters are also editors so they can come out of the gatherings to quickly tell interesting stories of what happened - all with a sensibility geared to the web.
This video is critical to allowing a much larger web audience fully understand what was accomplished in the meetings and what work remains. It also efficiently captures as many ideas as possible from those who physically attended so the ideas can be built upon online. The online community working on the problem does not have to start from scratch and new people who continue to join the project can quickly get up-to-speed.
The Stages of our Process
Next Agenda has developed a step-by-step process that follows a common sense trajectory of how to solve any big, complex challenge. We go through a series of stages, with some done primarily in physical meetings, and others primarily online. In fact, one of the key concepts is to weave between the two worlds over the course of the project, leveraging the best of both worlds.
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