Our Waves

 

Any collaborative work done offline in a physical gathering is done intuitively. People don’t need to be taught how to watch a presentation, discuss the ideas in a group, turn to their neighbor for a private conversation, sketch on a common whiteboard, or raise their hands to vote. They just do it and it works. 

 

“Waves” are the closest online equivalent of just showing up in a room and collaborating with other people. You can watch a video presentation together, discuss the ideas as a group in real time, carry out a private conversation on the side with one person, sketch out ideas with others in common documents, or even essentially raise your hand in a public vote. 

 

Waves encompass all those previously distinct operations that had been carried out online by different tools like web video, wikis, and instant messaging. They integrate the tools together and design an online experience that allows the users to focus on the work that needs to be done – not the tools themselves.

 

Google Wave, the foundation for our waves, is a brand new platform so it’s not fully developed and as seamless an experience as one would like. But it’s the best thing on the Internet to date – and a great leap over what people used to do.

 

Next Agenda uses waves as the central organizing unit of all our online collaborative work. Every video of an expert’s idea shot at a gathering could also anchor a wave and allow people to vote on its relevance, discuss and challenge it, or build on the idea with others to make it better. Or every major idea or conversation can be a wave that could conceivably roll through the entire Challenge time period, pulling in people and ideas all along the way.  (Still not clear about Waves? Check out our separate page on “What Are Waves?.” [link])

 

Not all our work is on waves. We still have a blog, and the basics of a Web 2.0 website. We also have a nifty little tool that we specifically developed for Next Agenda: our Q & A tool.

 

This tool allows anyone to ask questions and give answers. Figuring out a complex challenge requires asking a lot of questions – particularly at the beginning. And many of those questions have ready answers out there that we just need someone to point out and link up. Some questions, however, are more open-ended and don’t have ready answers. Those kinds of fundamental questions may elicit many different answers that our community can rank so the best ones rise to the top. 

 

All our tools are used to continue what could be metaphorically considered “waves of collaborative work” within our network as we head into the endgame.