Leyden then, shortly after the 2004 American election, could see that politics was ripe to apply the capabilities of the new media and new web-based tools and he helped people in politics transform the way they conducted politics, culminating in the campaign of Barack Obama that changed the way of doing politics forever by using web video, social networking, text messaging to overwhelm the traditional means of connecting people and getting out the vote.

The story of Next Agenda comes out of those experiences. In the summer of 2008, Leyden started to build the core team that began applying their expertise to how these new media tools would go beyond how you did politics to how you'd use these tools to actually start solving large-scale problems in the public realm, as well as how organizations could take advantages of these to become more effective in their industries and the global economy at large. The team started focusing on innovation in two main areas that had the greatest potential for structural breakthrough in solving large-scale problems and complex challenges that have daunted efforts to date.

The first area was focused on video: how you take advantage of relatively inexpensive but high-quality video that was now able to move through the internet? One of the clear spaces that needed work was how would you link up the collaboration that must be done in face-to-face settings with the collaboration that can only be done online? Each area has its unique advantages as well as its drawbacks. You need face-to-face interaction to do things like bond, connect, work with real focus and subtlety and have very complex interactions for concentrated periods of time. But the limit is that you can't get many people to do that and there are obvious logistical limits on how you gather people like that.

In the online world, on the other hand, there are no limits to the amount of people, and there are no time constraints - you can keep working on it over weeks and months if not years. Yet online you don't have the same kind of deep, emotional connections or the ability to have the same kind of nuanced and sophisticated collaborative work. Video would help to make the link between those two worlds, getting much more that happened in the face-to-face world in the online world so that people could build on the work that was done face-to-face on the ground.

The other area that Next Agenda started focusing on was how you could get the work being done among collaborators online to more closely resemble the sophistication that you would get in face-to-face and allow you to scale up numbers that could only be dreamed about getting in a room. Next Agenda did a lot of its own early development work in this space, and over the course of late 2009 and 2010 began working closely with Google as they worked on their Google Wave project, which shared some similar strategic goals. Next Agenda became a favored developer in the Google Network and was able to frequently work closely with Google to both help them refine their product as well as figure out ways to apply it more effectively to what we were doing.

Next Agenda then through the course of 2009 and 2010 had a succession of projects that have kept us iterating both in this video space and this online tool space. There are three projects that we are particularly proud of and we lay out in some detail on this website. The initial one was a public project to attack a very pressing yet complex challenge of how the United States could respond to climate change by much more rapidly shifting to clean energy technologies, particularly the clean energy that could go in our electrical grid. We brought roughly 200 experts together to begin thinking about strategies that would allow the United States to get all its electricity from clean energy as quick as possible, as quickly as within 10 years. We started using our integrated video techniques in that gathering and we built a website that moved that video into the online world and started to do some collaboration, including using the early Google Wave beta tool.

Shortly afterward, we had a different project with a corporate client that had very similar goals, in that they had 300 top executives gathering in Paris and needed our sophisticated new video techniques to much more immersively cover it and get as much of that meeting onto the web so that all 20,000 employees could feel connected to it and understand what happened. Through their collaborative web environment, they built on those ideas and contributed to the refinement of them in the months after.

We also have a huge, ongoing project with a nonprofit backed by George Soros that's making an audacious attempt to tackle yet another complex problem, which is to challenge the existing economic paradigm and reinvent a new economic paradigm that's more suited to the 21st century. For this client, Next Agenda has done everything from building their website with an advanced collaborative platform to shooting and covering their inaugural conference. We recorded video of all 50 speakers, and put the video online in an immersive experience of what took place there online in an ongoing fashion drive their online content to stimulate their community to begin to collaborate around these very important but very difficult questions in pursuit of their ambitious goal.

Next Agenda, in our two years of existence has learned an incredible amount. We have done an immense amount of innovation – we have developed, iterated, and refined a range of tools and a body of work that is in the front end of a very important field. We've built a team of experts and a network of extended practitioners, video journalists and designers who believe in our mission, who are committed to our vision – which is to help organizations solve complex problems through the use of video and applying the next generation of web tools in ways they've never been used before.