Meaningfully engaging young people in the civic process is one of the biggest challenges for us all today. The UK Times reports on an idea which one UK Health Authority tried out which some would say is innovative but others would say its a total waste of public money. What do you think?

EMERGENCE. Biological experts discuss how Fireflies synchronize their flashing in an incredible way plus amazing insight into the discovery of Ant Pheromones from Dr. Edward O. Wilson himself.

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.

Robert's Rules of Order, originally written in 1896, proposes a set of rules for conducting Fair and Orderly Meetings & Conventions. Many of Robert's Rules still apply to meetings today - even virtual meetings!

Pat Garland, at Egovni reports on a survey carried out by McKinsey and Company which suggests that business execs love user-driven collaboration but are much less enthusiastic about blogs.

Aviation giant Boeing is putting large scale multi-party collaboration right at the heart of the new 787 Dreamliner development with 60 business partners working across 72 sites around the world.

Pattern recognition skills in bees are so advanced they can recognise human faces better than we can

According to Robin McKie writing for The Observer in “Clever raven proves that it's no birdbrain“ scientists have discovered an unexpected candidate for the title of the world's second smartest creature: the raven

An essay by Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian shows why it is important to have good friendship rings as well as strong social/business networks and how to tell the difference.

Yesterday Google announced a new premier edition of its Google Apps online collaboration suite, combining GMail, Google Talk, Calendar. Page Creator, Startpage, Google Docs and Spreadsheets under a hosted subscription service. Robin Good offers an excellent review of the components, pricing and the support package.