I am pleased to announce the launch of “The Bumble Bee's Top Collaboration Techniques” as a mini site within www.bioteams.com as a practical resource for coaches, facilitators and team leaders who are incubating or supporting teams, networks, groups or communities, either Virtual or Co-located.

Operational meetings are the engine of organisational and project governance however often their success is left totally to chance. Heres my 7 tips for making them more effective

Here is an interesting article which uses Wikipedia as an example of a collaborative multi-agent system (MAS) involving both human and non-human agents. The same approach could be used to map any collaborative system.

Rapleaf is a neat application which takes an email address and returns an online reputation dashboard based on the owner's participation in online social networks etc. I interviewed Dan Scudder, Product Marketing for Rapleaf, to find out more.

Online Reputation Systems are merely digital embodiments of two fundamental mechanisms which humans use to decide whether to trust each other as defined by Philosopher Bertrand Russell : trusting by Acquaintance and trusting by Description.

In his unique book Dialogue and the art of thinking together William Issacs introduces the Four-Player System originally developed by David Kantor. This is a very important technique for supporting real collaborative thinking in teams.

In a competitive and crowded market for mobile devices and collaboration software a trap for new entrants is to try to do all things well: this goes against the timeless design principle of cohesion.

A single ant or bee isn't smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems, from truck routing to military robots.

With the explosion in social software and the recognition that these types of systems need to reach critical mass to survive and prosper it is amazing that so few people seem to be applying the well-established philosophical principles of living systems (autopoiesis) to design for sustainability.