If this is your first time here, please read this description of the project

Introduction

OpenKollab aims to provide a solution to specific problems that prevent open collaboration from occuring. Our solution is a combination of software development, process design, and community building. At OpenKollab.com, you'll be able to:

• Host a virtual meeting
• List an open project that you want help with
• Promote your meetings and projects to a community of collaboratively-minded people

• Relate your project to similar projects, and build coalitions

Sound familiar? It's been tried before. Throughout this document, we'll explain why our approach in detail, always updating this document as our vision evolves. We'll let you judge whether it's worth your time.

Ask Us

Websites shouldn't try to do everything for humans. They should help humans get together to work things out for themselves. We've got humans here to answer your questions, so don't hesitate to ask:

• By email:

  Join our email discussion at OpenKollab Google Group

• By chat:
  • We'll be improving our chat help, but for now read Wikipedia's IRC Tutorial.
  • Find out, how to use ChatZilla, an extension for Firefox: ChatZilla Help

We want everyone's involvement, but remember that this is an early stage project. Right now, we're cobbling together a set of existing tools so that we can test our ideas (a slick web app is on the way). In the meantime, if you want to participate actively, you'll need to be patient with a less than perfect user experience.

Why Are We Building This?

OpenKollab grew out of an event in June 2009 called Participation Camp. Besides OpenKollab, there were a number of project ideas that popped up. They all seemed useful and novel, and people were enthusiastic about taking the next steps on them. But, in most cases, the enthusiasm simply died out from lack of coordination or leadership.

This is a frequent occurrence at conferences. Face-to-face interaction generates a real willingness to collaborate and creates its own energy. People build trust, which helps them overcome the small differences that had prevented collaboration previously.

This is happening at conferences all over the world. There are thousands of conferences every year, and many of them produce closely related project ideas. But, sadly, most of them never find a way to get hooked into the larger collaborative network that could support their efforts.

Sustaining Open Projects Through Strategic Confluence

Our goal is to catalyze strategic confluence among related projects, allowing more of them to survive to maturity. The OpenKollab platform and process will:

• Help related projects find each other
• Give distributed teams an easy way to plan and host a series of virtual and physical meetings to sustain their project
• Provide access to a broader community of collaboraters and facilitators that can help your team improve its process and

The more a project can align and coordinate itself with a family of related projects, the more likely it is to find the people and resources it needs to grow.

Scope of This Project

Improving collaboration is a big problem, with lots of ways of framing it and countless potential solutions. It's a problem that extends well beyond conference-generated projects and into every domain of collective human endeavor. In order to stay on track and actually deliver something specific, we're keeping the scope of this project narrow.

Early Stage Projects

We cater to new projects that lack the resources, organizational structure and established leadership that sustains a project. They also are often quite cutting edge, a new need having been identified by the group of experts assembled at the event. This means that they require a lot of development before a broader audience can be inspired to support them.

By focusing on early stage projects, we avoid getting into the business of building full-scale project management and campaign tools. And it's easier to create confluence among projects that are not yet established and defined in their mission and strategy.

Open Projects

We cater to projects that are transparent and participatory in their approach. Their primary concern is with getting the project completed, and tend to think of profit as secondary to the end goal. This openness allows the projects to take advantage of the resources that are distributed throught OpenKollab's network of collaborators. We focus on building a web of trust, so that resources can flow more freely to where they are most needed.

Real Time Interaction

Just as face-to-face is more productive than virtual, we find that real-time virtual meetings (conference calls, scheduled chat sessions) are essential within collaborative groups. They enhance productivity and trust-building.

In addition, distinct projects with shared goals often have clearly established wiki and discussion list territories, and are slow to work towards merging their platform with that of another group. However, most projects are less established in their real-time practices. By focusing on this more fluid and less bounded territory, we increase our ability to facilitate collaboration and break down silos.

Social Process

In addition to the web infrastructure, we recognize that there is also a social component that must be consciously designed. We intend to cultivate a community of volunteer facilitators who will assist groups as they use the site to seek out related groups, resolve differences between groups, and move forward on their collaborations.

What's Next

We're already building it and using our system. 

You can see our total plan by viewing the Roadmap:

Our first group project will be focused on mapping the relationships between existing projects:

Come join us in the chat room to learn more!