Finding collaborators

Having experimented with the virtual cafe idea over a couple of years and used it successfully for the previous two books in this series, I now have to put it to the ultimate test: to find out if it can be instrumental in the creation of an e-business. First I had to find collaborators.

There were three sources I could use:

1) People I knew and had already had dealings with

2) People who had visited my Web site and expressed an interest in my work

3) People selected from discussion forums

Most of the people who visit my Web site go there out of curiosity because they have either encountered me in a discussion forum or have read one of my books. I also have a few articles on the Web site that bring people there through referral or recommendation.

On this Web site I invite visitors to subscribe to a newsletter that I send out from time to time.This provides a small but steady stream of new contacts (currently at the rate of about one per day). Over time, this has built up to several hundred people who are aware of me and my work. When I have need of any assistance I can appeal to this group and because they know me I have more chance of a response than appealing to a group of complete strangers.

More difficult is getting collaboration from complete strangers in e-mail discussion forums. I've tried several times to explain what I'm doing by posting to a forum as a whole, but, this seldom elicits any response. A regular feature of almost every discussion forum I've participated in has been propositions by different members of the group to join in something they are organising. As far as I can tell, these appeals are seldom successful, it seems that discussion groups get so saturated with offers of this kind that responses are always very low.

The only way that seems to work is to spend some time in a forum, contributing to the discussions to establish some kind of identity. By initiating discussions in the area of interested it is possible to discover people who might make suitable collaborators.

As I know I'm going to work with an unconventional strategy, I usually initiate a discussion by making what would seem to be an outrageous statement. Usually this is something along the lines of "planning is not appropriate in e-business" or "managed teams are not an efficient organisational structure". Such propositions immediately polarize opinion and it is easy to identify those who would be inclined towards my way of thinking. Once identified, I can then contact them off-list and explain the nature of the collaborative project I have in mind.

In this way, I assembled a group of about fifty people to collaborate with me in this project. Between them, they represent a far ranging variety of different fields and interests. Here are some of the items taken from their bios they sent to me when agreeing to join the group:

Teacher of Web authoring from Melbourne in Australia

An American engineer, experienced in management of linguistic schools, specialising in technical translations from Japanese to English

A Spanish telecom engineer writing a doctoral thesis on business and applying game theory to digital satellite pay TV

An expert on workflow in new media companies

A Director of a Web design company in South Africa

An American business consultant who advises companies on setting up e-businesses

A nuclear physicist who has set up company Intranets and has a strong interests in electronic art and video, now freelancing as a Web designer

A programming and Web design Guru from Scotland who is just setting up an eConsultancy service

A graduate in Biological Computation, whose dissertation, and present specialisation is on web-based decision support systems for farmers

A college program manager for a fine arts course who has just received funding to research new media applications in fine art.

An Oxford University graduate in philosophy and economics who is now running three micro businesses and doing consulting work in public relations and marketing.

A marketing manager for a company supplying Web based applications.

A multimedia developer, a principal in a company providing ISP and Web hosting services, responsible for site development, deployment and maintenance, business support systems and promotion

A specialist in intelligent agents and evolutionary systems, working out of Santa Fe

Manager of a multimedia design company

Lecturer and researcher from a university in India

Graduate from the Netherlands, specialising in Information Studies, Information Management and document retrieval systems

An ex professional saxophone player, now specialising in Web based multimedia productions

Senior systems analyst with a prominent New York bank

Italian consultant, experienced in IT project Management within the financial services industry

Transport system specialist,t now migrated to the Web

Cross Media Technology Designer, working with one of the most powerful media corporations in Italy, providing new business solutions linking the Internet/TV/radio/mobiles/paper/... worlds

Engineering consultant, helping the chemical and food processing industries design and optimize manufacturing and logistics processes as well as realizing and improving plants and factories.

German IT consultant

Managing editor for an international publisher of books on e-business and information technology

Canadian system analyst, specialising in databases and server side programming solutions

Investment analyst, with a large firm of broker who bring many dotcom IPOs to the market.

Eccentric entrepreneur, one time accountant, now studying plants at a mountain retreat in Texas

Principal of a group of freelance Web designers, specialising in backend solutions

A Web site designer employed by a large company in Amsterdam

German specialist in Virtual Communities and Customer Relationship Management Tools

It is not difficult to see how such a varied assembly of collaborators can be of great assistance in a quest to find and establish an e-business. They are valuable contacts into a world of mind numbing complexity. They won't have all the answers, but, I'll be a lot better off with their help than I would be trying to find and develop an e-business opportunity on my own.

Obviously, it wouldn't be wise to force a single idea onto this group. It will be better to sow a few seeds and see which take hold. Even more likely, an idea will emerge out of the discussions in the virtual cafe – ideas which I wouldn't even be able to imagine at the commencement of this project.