Clean Energy Challenge

For this project, Next Agenda gathered 200 top experts in clean energy, finance, business, new media, and politics to try to answer the question of how America could get all of its electricity onto clean energy as fast as possible. We wanted to make sure that we maximized the impact of these 200 people who gave the full day of their time, from dawn to dusk, and so we had a large team of next generation video journalists who captured everything on stage.

This meeting went far beyond any normal conference - it had a number of breakout groups, report-outs from those breakout groups, and brainstorming sessions where we had many ideas on how to approach this challenge. Next Agenda captured all of this in high-definition video. It was very challenging to cover, and also challenging to clearly, accurately, and compellingly communicate what happened. But we did all of this and more.

We were able to tell the story of what happened on the stage, in a way that allowed people online to fully engage with the ideas. We also did side interviews with a full 80 people, including 30 in-depth in two side rooms, in which we used two cameras so that we could more quickly and efficiently edit to the best of the material without the jerky edit look that can happen with a single camera shoot. We also did 50 roving interviews, in which we asked those who were gathered there, all experts in some way or another, common questions, and then were able to compile pieces that had rapid series of different perspectives on the answers to these questions, what we call montages.

In the end, by covering everything that happened on stage and side interviews, we were able to create highly-produced overview pieces, including an interpretative piece, using a person who acted as a neutral journalistic foil who told the story of experiencing this entire day from beginning to middle to end, much like an outside participant would try to understand everything that took place there. This was geared toward younger people, and was used as a way to get people interested online, engaging the material and getting involved.

We also produced trailer pieces, montage pieces, and more edited versions of the interviews. Through this variety of products we could effectively lay out what happened in a compelling way, particularly with the use of a unique piece of Flash software that we developed and have now perfected. This “interactive whiteboard,” allows users to visually experience an event through an interactive interface that connects different videos, as if somebody is sketching out the connections in real time.

Collaboration

For this project, we were absolutely central to collaboration, both in the physical space itself, driving the design and facilitation of the meeting, as well as the online collaboration that happened after the event around the video. Our team includes world-class professionals who know how to approach real challenges in a way that we designed to develop innovative solutions that are not out of the box, but have to be tailored to individual clients.

With this approach, we took on the difficult challenge of how America would get all of its electricity onto clean energy as fast as possible. Experts laid out what is technically feasible in ten years, touching on renewable resources such as solar and wind energy. Conference participants then collectively tried to figure out what would be the barriers in the social, political, business and finance, and how they could come up with solutions to break through those barriers, using the expert insights to stimulate thinking at the beginning of the day. This fed into a large brainstorming session and breakouts into smaller groups that were able to drill down deeper into specific ways to do that.

The conference ended with a synthesis, where the whole group came back together, connected the dots and began to look towards what next steps could happen, particularly online.

Once we got the video online, we were able to begin collaboration using, what at the time (the end of 2009) was the bleeding edge of online web collaboration tools, Google Wave. Google had put a crack team on a way of devising a way of integrating all the disparate tools of collaboration like Wikis, instant messaging, and discussion boards into one integrated tool, and they built it as a platform that allowed outside developers to create applications that would refine specifics of online collaboration, like how users can vote and rank, and how they can work on a common whiteboard.

At the time, the tool was not ready for the public, it was in an alpha stage, but Next Agenda was a privileged partner of Google – we had advanced use of the Wave beta application, and were able to get some of the leading members of this community that had gathered into using the tool as one of the very first examples that Google supported and to some extent, showcased. Unfortunately, since then, Google has stopped development of the tool, partly because it was a very sophisticated tool, which worked for sophisticated users, such as Next Agenda and the people we work with, but that wasn't really suited for mass adoption that the Google senior team felt they needed.

Even though Google has stopped putting resources into Wave, they have opened up the software to the open source community and there's a good chance that the capability of this remarkable tool will continue in some form in the year or two ahead.

Fortunately for us, we weren't solely dependent on Google Wave. We had developed a question and answer forum in our Drupal web environment that allows someone to pose a question to a group and allow many people to answer it and have the larger group of viewers rank those answers and see the best ones rise to the top. We also have a lot of the Web 2.0 commenting ability and social networking ability built-in to our core platform if clients need a comprehensive solution including the development of a web platform geared to web collaboration and complex problem-solving on a large scale.