Our Waves
The Online Waves of Collaborative Work
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.
The Institute for New Economic Thinking 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 on for months, pulling in people and ideas all along the way. (Still not clear about Waves? Check out our separate page on “What Are Waves? below.”
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 tool that that allows visitors to ask questions and give their answers to other questions in an effort to leverage the collective knowledge out there.
All our tools are used to continue what could be metaphorically considered “waves of collaborative work” within our growing community on and through the web.
Our Google Waves
The Institute will base much of our online collaborative work in the coming weeks and months on the new tool Google Wave. As of our website launch, Google Wave is not publicly available and you must have a Google Wave account to see the Waves that we do have.
Within weeks Waves will be viewable by anyone on the web – even those without Google Wave accounts. Check back soon and we will be posting some of our working waves that you can read and watch.
In order to engage and manipulate INET’s Waves, now or in the future, you will need to have an INET Wave account. To apply for access for that account, and the deeper access to our community that comes with it, please fill out this application form and we will contact you soon.
What Are Waves?
The tech world is just now introducing a new word into its vocabulary: “Waves.” If you have heard the term, then it probably was in conjunction with Google, as in “Google Wave.” But there are other more elastic ways to use the term - as in “INET Waves.” With that in mind, let’s step through the basics...
