I fully acknowledge that I am not the first to use this analogous tale below, to illustrate a point. But here’s the thing. Last Thursday, I sat in the office of a guy I consider pretty smart. I shared some of the stuff we’re doing in nomadic ways. travel and he more or less opposed everything. I shared how we’re building mobile apps in the local tourism space. The focus, I told him, is not just tourism, but enterprise development where every microenterprise on a tourist route, can be promoted to and found by tourists. He said “this sounds like another app just for the sake of an app. Have you asked people if they want and need it?” he asked. He added that people keep creating apps that no one needs because they fail to consult.

Ever thought about a collaborative era business built on collaboration with a crowd that is really just saying ‘thanks for the great service’? I recently came across exactly that. Sitting in my office, having created a great presentation with awesome images, and ready to press the send button, I glanced at size and realised it was 43.3mbs. Clearly, while wonderfully creative, it was just too damn big!

If your business, organisation, NPO, municipality, city or initiative does not have a well-defined community today, you’re missing multiple opportunities. Community is at the very core of the collaborative era and smart businesses are harnessing the power of community to co-create and crowd source.

FROM PECHA KUCHA JOHANNESBURG

27 JANUARY 2016 - the slides and the transcript

1. Collaboration is the new black and it’s changing the world, often in the most unexpected ways. Thanks to Pecha Kucha Johannesburg for being curious enough around the topic. The image was taken in Tahrir Square in Cairo at the height of the Arab Spring in 2011. People silenced for many years gathered in their thousands.