Catalyzing a Public Network
Of Remarkable Innovators from Diverse Fields
There are far too few places where talented, knowledgeable people can gather to meet, whether physically or virtually online, with like-minded people who want to do their part to help solve the challenges their country or smaller communities face. There are not a lot of ways for people with ideas and energy to actively contribute to figuring out the complex problems of out times. This is particularly true when you have a full-time job and can only give a portion of your time and energy in helping in this public capacity.
We at Next agenda believe that there are many, many high-capacity people who are looking for a productive way they can genuinely volunteer their talents and knowledge towards goals that more broadly benefit their communities and country. They sincerely want to get involved in efforts where the skills and knowledge they have developed in their careers and use to earn a living can also be applied to the larger public good. There is ample evidence of this widespread yearning – from the groundswell of work people put towards President Obama’s grassroots campaign to the outpouring of interest we found in our initial call for experts and innovators to help solve our Clean Energy Challenge.
Next Agenda is providing one of the few places where these kind of high-capacity people can gather in our physical meetings and in our online environment to productively contribute to figuring out something of great importance to the country, and by extension, to their communities, children, friends and families. Our early invites to high-quality experts and innovators have been very well received and bode well for growing a very valuable network over time.
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Our concept for growing our network of participants in our public challenges is to keep it invite only with several twists. It’s important to get the right mix of people working on complex challenges and special attention must be paid to the diversity of perspectives and talents and expertise in the project. That’s particularly true of physical gatherings where there are basic physical constraints on how many people can attend.
That said, we at Next Agenda and the leaders of our challenges can’t possibly know the best people to get involved so we leverage the expertise of the network right form the start. Anyone who is invited can invite two more people who they think can bring something to the table that will help in solving the challenge – and we’re open to hearing about far more suggestions than two. We also have a process where anyone coming to our website or hearing about our efforts can apply to become a member, attend gatherings, get a google Wave account, and fully participate in our online collaborative environment.
This invite filter to become part of the core network is partly a necessary evil that must be maintained to avoid some of the unfortunate excesses that can come with online collaboration. If you completely open up membership you can get flooded with people with one bias or another who constantly skew the deliberations. Sometimes you get people who actively try to screw things up too. We at Next Agenda know the web well and are using the absolute best practices to maintain the highest quality deliberations in our online environment. We also maintain a basic registration on our website that allows anyone to become a general registered user of the website who can comment and make some more limited contributions, and with time get recruited into the core network working in the more sophisticated collaborative environment of Google Wave. And, of course the general public or anyone can watch and learn from what happens on the website.
One key byproduct of our approach to building a diverse, high-quality network of experts and innovators is that it will become valuable with time. We expect to be catalyzing a lot of remarkable people focusing on ambitious challenges in very important areas ranging from clean energy to low-impact transportation to healthy and sustainable food production. We anticipate that some companies or other large organizations would be interested in helping sponsor the process, both for high minded reasons of doing their part to solve public challenges of this sort, as well as more self-interested reasons. They will want to ensure their brand is seen as part of the solution. The business of sponsorship is well established around traditional conferences and even online work. Our model is an evolution.
There are far too few places where talented, knowledgeable people can gather to meet, whether physically or virtually online, with like-minded people who want to do their part to help solve the challenges their country or smaller communities face. There are not a lot of ways for people with ideas and energy to actively contribute to figuring out the complex problems of out times. This is particularly true when you have a full-time job and can only give a portion of your time and energy in helping in this public capacity. 
