The Official Rick Bell Blog

Collaboration Leads to Innovation?

Leave it to a food blog to teach me the value of collaboration and Web 2.0 socialization of ideas.

Backing up, I’m not what you would call a natural team player. Though I play well with others in the sandbox of life, my work products tend to be solo efforts. As I watch my daughters navigate the college years where now where nothing seems to be an individual assignment, I am grateful I made it through before group projects became all the rage.

I only worked on one group project in college--and I’m still miffed about it. Out of a group of six, two of us did 90% of all the work. And one of us, namely me, was saddled with pulling it all together the night before it was due.

So when the evangelist of the New Web started preaching the value of collaboration I was not a ready-made convert… until, as I mentioned, I started following a food blog

As my waistline battles will attest, I likes me some home cooking. So naturally the first widget I added to my Google homepage was a link to a popular food blog. At first I simply tracked the recipes being posted to see if there were any I wanted incorporate into my Sunday dinner extravaganzas.

Then one day, when the stress and tedium of corporate life could not be alleviated by playing cell phone Tetris in a bathroom stall, I decided to navigate the comments of said food blog. Expecting nothing but thumbs up and thumbs down I was amazed but what I found.

Some comments clarified how the recipe should be executed. This proved especially valuable on recipes for baked goods. (I can cook, but my baking--like my love life--often comes up limp and unfulfilling.) Other comments suggested variations on the basic recipe that even my fertile imagination would have never conjured. And the thumbs up/thumbs down comments helped guide my decision as to whether I should plagiarize the recipe and attempt to pass it off as my own creation… oh wait, I would never do that. 

Collaboration really does translate into innovation. As I began to grasp that concept I saw the utility of incorporating sociability features (comments, ratings, wikis, etc,) into the software and web development projects I was working on. Eventually this gave birth to www.brainstorm101.org, a website that allows the public sector collaborate on innovations, best practices and challenging questions—allowing for real change in the way government operates.

Does everyone contribute equally? Of course not, But as my food blog experience taught me, too many cooks actually don’t spoil the broth. Working together, far superior results can be achieved

Can collective genius reshape government?

The issues facing local, state and Federal government are acute. Declining tax revenues, increased demands for services and a majority of the workforce quickly nearing retirement.

The solution is you. Using www.brainstorm101.org, you can participate in a shared public sector idea bank—the key word being “participate.”  www.brainstorm101.org is not a static repository of information, but a Web 2.0-powered site where members rate, enlarge upon and refine best practices, innovations and answers to pressing questions.

For many, Web 2.0 just means sociability—the meeting and greeting of people. This is an important aspect of the New Web, but sociability is just the beginning. The real dividends are realized when the tools allow you to form a community and tap the power of collective genius.

www.brainstorm101.org is less about social networking and more about capturing, refining and sharing actionable information. The site fundamentally improves the way managers and employees interact as all community members are free to post, review, and refine best practices, innovations, questions and answers. Information is not pushed from the top down, but springs forth at every level—collaboration replaces strictly-enforced hierarchies.

Because all contributions can be reviewed and rated by the community, weaker submissions are naturally weeded out… our search engine actually retrieves higher-rated contributions first.

By keeping the site closed to predatory vendors and prohibiting recruiting we encourage openness. We are, by design, less about making contacts and more about sharing information. It is about enlarging the idea bank.

www.brainstorm101.org represents a new attitude of how government can be transformed--mass collaboration and shared solutions are the key.

Though open for free to early adopters, there will eventually be a modest fee for organizations joining the site. We don’t want vendor clutter (no ads) and we are funding focused data mining activities. Our Internet librarians are embarking on a nationwide effort to tap into the most successful employee suggestion/innovation programs in the public sector and collect the best in best practices.

Care to join us as an early adopter? Contact rick@brainstorm101.org or kindy@brainstorm101.org today.