How To Drive Collaborative Decision Making

The concept of collaborative decision making is frequently employed as a catchall that includes everything from face-to-face communication to knowledge management to coordinating partnerships. Collaborative decision making is a descendent of the broader concept of a virtual workspace, in which potentially disparate teams can come together to access a common work environment, post and share supporting information, and communicate in real time to solve problems. This virtual workspace equates to a combination of the model itself and three key levels of collaboration.

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The 4 Elements of Visual Grammar: How To Communicate Without Words | Van SEO Design

I often use the phrase “visual design” when describing what we do as web designers. Recently I came across what I think is better phrase, “communication design.” When we design and build websites our goal is usually to communicate something to an audience. Communication requires language. That language can be aural as in the spoken word, it can be gestural as in sign language, or it can be visual as in design. The more you understand any language the better you can communicate using that language. The visual language of design is no exception. Design elements are like letters and words. When we add design principles and apply them to our elements, our words, we form a visual grammar. As we learn to use both we enable ourselves to communicate visually.

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Digital Anthropology and Your Tribe

TalkTalk is a provider of digital communication technology services in the UK mainly. The recently teamed up with the University of Kent to research peoples' attitudes and behaviours towards the digital world. The aim was to go beyond traditional rseearch to determine how techonology fits into our lives.

Six stereotypes were identified - the Digital Extroverts, the Timid Technophobes, the Social Secretaries, the First Lifers,the E-ager Beavers, the Web Boomers, full descriptions of which can be read from the full report Digital Anthrolopogy.

Fancy seeing which tribe you belong to...Take the quick quiz to find out.

Clay Shirky: How cellphones, Twitter, Facebook can make history

The future of communications...

Network effects; youth vs adults; reshaping publics

Social media is not new. Media has been leveraged for sociable purposes since the caveman's walls. Even in the realm of the Internet, some of the first applications were framed around communication and sharing. For decades, we've watched the development of new genres of social media - MUDs/MOOs, instant messaging, chatrooms, bulletin boards, etc. Social media is the latest buzzword in a long line of buzzwords. It is often used to describe the collection of software that enables individuals and communities to gather, communicate, share, and in some cases collaborate or play. In tech circles, social media has replaced the earlier fave "social software." Academics still tend to prefer terms like "computer-mediated communication" or "computer-supported cooperative work" to describe the practices that emerge from these tools and the old school academics might even categorize these tools as "group-work" tools. Social media is driven by another buzzword: "user-generated content" or content that is contributed by participants rather than editors. But for the last few years, everyone's been abuzz with the idea of "social media." Right now, those who want VC backing need to bake the "social" into any Web 2.0 app they create. There are many new genres of social media that have gained traction here: blogs, wikis, media-sharing sites, social network sites, social bookmarking, virtual worlds, microblogging sites, etc. These tools are part of a broader notion of "Web2.0." Yet-another-buzzword, Web 2.0 means different things to different people.

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