I've been discussing With Roberto Santoro after the "Regional Innovation Clusters" workshop that has been held in Rome on 21 April 2006 about his vision of using a metaphoric representation of Collaborative Innovation which is "the Garden of Ideas".

I've recently initiated a new working group fully dedicated to the new research field of Knowledge Connection. This working group is currently constituted of different expertises working together on developing related concepts such as:
- People-concepts networking
- Perceptual arena
- People-concept graphic maps

Two papers have already been prepared, one about introducing Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to better support People-concept graphic maps in 3D and another one about the integration of shared workspaces, community wiki and community blogging to provide more efficient people-concepts networking environments.

My main objective is to develop an approach that could be called "PerCeptUal Arena" (Person-conCept-visUal = a combination of 3 dimensions, namely: social, conceptual and visual dimensions) and which could support group of people to reach conciousness of something (new concepts) in a much faster way. This PerCeptUal Arena could be viewed as a Virtual Space where new concepts are emerging in a way that it will stimulate people creativity (inter-personal creativity).

How about this new layout for the wiki? I've redesigned the logo a bit, so that the "family of communities" text is proportionally much larger. This allowed me to reduce the overall size of the logo to what I think is the ideal: now the left column doesn't eat up so much space. I've also added a 3D touch which can be removed if you don't like it.

Why not to consider "Inter-personal Knowledge Connection" as one of the new research challenges that would definitely impact inter-personal productivity, creativity and innovation capabilities within CWE.

Inter-personal Knowledge Connection is a new research area I'm personally promoting which should lead to new collaboration approaches and techniques, and new ICT tools based on people-concepts networking and supported by on-line groups and communities. It is at the crossroads of Conceptual, Social and Visual dimensions where semantic and neural networks, virtual and augmented reality will play an active role in emulating inter-personal knowledge connection like setting-up a network of brains (or brain GRID) to support people creativity exercises.

(written in January 2005)
The idea of “People-concepts Networking” is based on the Group Forming Networks created by David P. Reed which says, essentially, that networks that facilitate easy group and community forming are subject to potentially exponential growth. In “People-concepts Networking” there is a physical network, in fact the Internet, and people (e.g. eProfessionals) having the opportunity to easily form groups and communities.

However, there is nothing at all automatic about it. It is what potentially can happen. But useful groups don’t necessarily form just because it is possible for them to do so. The Question is how to help people in forming eGroups and eCommunities?

(written in June 2003)
Clearly there is still a dramatic gap between the capabilities of current solutions and the needs of collaborative enterprises looking for adaptive, cost-effective and scalable business integration solutions.
There is a need to develop a systematic and holistic approach to rapidly form Virtual Enterprises based on an ubiquitous (anywhere, anytime) and affordable (easy and cheap) collaborative environment using a secure and interoperable business infrastructure within a multicultural & multilingual context.

Ultimate goal is to realise the vision of turning “inside-out” enterprises as a plug-and-play Internet business community. Actual Extended/Virtual Enterprise approaches create a big dilemma because each time a new partner is entering results in increasing exponentially management and integration costs mostly due to disparate procedures and kingdom solutions which are not interoperable.

I presume you had a look on the TouchGraph and HyperGraph material I've sent you.....
Please, be kind enough to let me know what you think about.

All communities leaders are invited for a private test of the new website during Feb 2006 before to publicly launch it as soon as possible