Stop Thinking Like an Ape. Collaborate "Like a Boss".
We here at Mercury Grove stumbled upon an interesting article in the New York Times about what differentiates us from the lower primates. Our ability to collaborate, and form social networks is one of the key drivers pushing the evolution of man in a unique and entirely separate direction from chimpanzees and other apes. A quote from the article by anthropologist Kim Hill of Arizona State University captures this idea,
“Humans are not special because of their big brains, that’s not the reason we can build rocket ships — no individual can. We have rockets because 10,000 individuals cooperate in producing the information.”
The evolutionary truth supported in this article was the foundation behind the new Web Collaboration (webcollaboration.com), a web based application focused around the notion that a group of people working together with vision and ambition, but without a blueprint can create great and beautiful things. Leveraging technology to facilitate this collaborative process has to date, been dominated by email, a tool really only created as an after thought in the advent of the internet, and only because “send mail” made sense to people.
However email is not the ultimate collaborator, and the following study done by Forrester Research goes a long way in identifying the issues of using email to collaborate:
Our vision of online collaboration in many ways pits technology as an after thought as well, focusing instead on the relationships of the individuals within groups and the idea behind conversation being many to many. Our projects grow organically out of the collaborative input of the individuals, the project does not dictate the input.
Check out what we’ve been up to and sign up for your free trial today. http://webcollaboration.com