I’ve just returned from Robert Scoble’s “OffTheGrid” camp in the Paradise Valley of Western Montana (pictured above, at dawn, from my sleeping bag in the front yard of the house). A very interesting and smart group of people discussed all matter of topics, including Web 2.0, the merits of tabs versus spaces in programming, the crisis in the Middle East, blogging & democracy in China, the future of education in America, really really high end digital video cameras, and various challenges of content aggregation and distribution. And that’s just what I remember offhand.

I also had numerous opportunities to explain and describe Grupthink. In a nutshell, my simplest definition was something like this:

Grupthink offers a new way to pose open-ended topics to a group and make sense of the group’s responses, bringing together internet-forum-like threads, town-hall-like open conversation, and the measurement tools of a survey or poll — to allow consensus to emerge.

Sort of a mouthful, I know. But it sure got the thoughtful questions started and conversations rolling. We talked about using Grupthink as an internal documentation tool, product reviews and e-commerce integration, political constituent engagement, a photo-judging tool, and also the pure sticky entertainment value of the “Surprise me” link.

I had particularly interesting and enjoyable interactions with these folks (in no particular order):

• Robert Scoble
• Wayne Johnson
• Heather Flanagan
• Aaron Tinling
• Christian Long of Design Share
• Mike Hoover, the content aggregator
• Megan Cunningham of Magnet Media
• Andrew Field of PrintingForLess.com
• Richard White, founder of KikoCalendar and SlimTimer

Thanks to all for the feedback and conversation, and a special thanks to Robert Scoble for hosting the OffTheGrid Camp.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 10th, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under Announcements. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.