This challenge can take another form. Say you do hold a fabulous gathering, such as a conference, in which people make terrific connections, start amazing conversations, but at the end of the conference the entire thing stops, and everybody goes away. And you face this complex challenge: How do you maintain those connections, and how do you build off of those conversations and how do you continue to have that gathering live on?

These two situations of how do you amplify a gathering are faced by all kinds of organizations, be it a private company, a nonprofit organization, or a public campaign. Next Agenda’s solution to this challenge involves two things:

One: using relatively cheap but high-quality video to capture as much of what happened in that physical gathering and reproduce as much of that as possible online, where large numbers of people or those who missed it could catch up and fully immerse. That kind of video would ideally have to be interesting and engaging, and would and have to be nuanced and sophisticated enough so that people could really get a sense of what it was like to be there.

Two: Once you get the video online to expose it to people, people need a way to engage and collaborate around the material. In short, they need a way to participate, to feel like they're involved in that meeting and have a way to comment or give their input to be able to express themselves and contribute. Next Agenda’s solution to this problem involves a nuanced level of online collaboration: not just viewing and passively consuming what happened, but actively collaborating – allowing users to roll up their sleeves and being able to get involved, feel connected, and contribute in some way.

Grow a Large Community

To build any vibrant community you need some key essentials. One is you always need to gather the core group physically - so much of community building has a kind of emotional bonding and complex interacting that can only come through physical gatherings.

But on the other hand in order to build a community you need a way to consistently stay connected and have more sophisticated and complex interaction where you are able to do productive things together. And that kind of sophisticated interaction almost certainly has to happen online. This is particularly true if the community is trying to grow, and is constantly adding newcomers who need to get up to speed in terms of what has already happened so that they can immediately have a meaningful connection and an ongoing way to contribute to that community as well. Growing a community gets more difficult if you're trying to do this globally, where physical gatherings are more difficult, simply because of the logistics and cost constraints of bringing people in and away from their families from a long way away.

This challenge can be met with a solution, taking the powerful capabilities of web video, to immersively cover physical gatherings that take place in the core of your community and opening them up to the community members who couldn't make it, or future newcomers who weren't around when the meeting took place. Cheap, high-quality video that's been edited – video that's been massaged to make it worth peoples' time to connect – is a hugely effective way to solve that need.

The other piece of the solution is to employ a suite of web tools that will allow people who do see that video to respond to that video in ways that replicate what they would have done in the gathering itself, whether it's raising their hand, asking a question, or even connecting directly with the people who seem most interesting to them. Luckily there is a range of online tools that allow you to see the profiles of people who are there, reach out to them and connect with them. Or pose a question to the group as a whole after the fact of the meeting and have people respond. Or to respond yourself on what took place, on the video you just watched.

There are many ways to do this, but without that understanding about what you can do within that web collaboration space, people who see that video can bounce off it and instead of being drawn into the community could be alienated and feel like there's no way in, no way to connect. No way to be part of your community.

Attack a Complex Problem

Any sufficiently complex challenge is going to need the immersion and laser-focus that comes from physically meeting. It's also going to need the continuity to keep applying energy and effort to the problem and develop solutions over time. Experts working together need effective ways to absorb all of the subtle, sophisticated work that arises from physical gatherings, but can also have a way to substantively contribute their own insights in times that don't always coincide with the physical meetings. And if the problem is complex enough, you’ll need many of these experts working together, to spur innovation. Obviously, this poses some difficulties.

Next Agenda has a two-pronged approach to this generic challenge.

Firstly, we use high-quality video to capture the nuance, all the passion, all the sophistication of what happens in the very complex interactions of high capacity people in physical settings. Video is ideal because it is quicker to produce than the corresponding written versions that would explain it, and it's quicker to take in than all the reading that would have to happen to do it. The lynchpin of passing on the nuance and the complexity of the physical gathering is best done on video, but given the amount of video it has to be relatively inexpensive video, because otherwise the costs get way too prohibitive.

The second thing is that you need a sophisticated way to connect people online, and it has to be simple, intuitive, and tailored enough so that it works for whatever challenge you are working with at the time so that people who are busy, who are pressed, who don't have a ton of time to give but still can give some can quickly get up to speed and be able to contribute effectively. For this to be done right, it needs you to draw from a range of current technologies like Wikis, web connections through Skype, web conferences, and instant messaging, among others.

And depending on the complexity of the challenge, you also might need to take advantage of some of the less familiar but more advanced web collaboration tools that are just now emerging.