Archive for January, 2010

Seth Godin describes in his book Tribes that one of the problems with old type of organizations is that communication happens top-down or bottom up but not sideways: between coworkers and team members. It’s easy to write a memo to your boss and wait a month or so for a response and hoping that your ideas might happen at some point in the future.

Here at Flowr we think that there is a better way to work together. We talk a lot about Real-Time Collaboration which is one of the ways for an organization to encourage talking sideways. Encouraging everyone to share as much as they can and to share their progress, ideas and ask questions out in the open is a basic building block of new type of organization. One that then takes this knowledge and empowers its workers with tools analyze ideas and connect with each other. The biggest changes come from people from different departments that are passionate about similar ideas and have not discovered that they can form their own tribe around it.

It’s not about technology but about building tools that empower you to work together at creating new, bigger ideas that might never happen otherwise.

After many months of development we’re happy to announce that we’ve started opening Flowr to the interested teams that would like to improve the way they collaborate.

This is a preview release which means:

• it’s still rough around the edges, but it works overall
• we’re still testing out many concepts so things like interaction and user interface will change
• we expect you to give us feedback so we can make it even better
• no matter what, we’ll ensure that you will always be able to get to your data

Preview release is completely free with all the features and we won’t forget our tester friends as we introduce premium offerings. If you are still interested, let us know by emailing to team@theflowr.com the following information:

• number of participants in your Flowr network
• primary language that you use to communicate inside your group

To get a better feel for Flowr, here is a screenshot of our internal Flowr:

Essence of Flowr is in sharing and collaborating with your team. A big part of this is research on the topic and sharing links with your Flowr group. To make this process easier we’ve designed a Bookmarklet that will allow you publish directly into your Flowr stream or to a specific group.

Until we release our Flowr Toolbox, you can get it by visiting:

http://{your flowr network name}.theflowr.com/bookmarklet