Recently I stumbled upon Roomware, which is a project that links virtual identities of people to their real-life presence at an event. The idea is that online information about a person can be connected to his or her presence at an offline event. When I mentioned this to a few of my colleagues, their reaction was: “Nice, but what does that have to do with our innovation initiatives?” Well, let me try to explain that…
Many organisations have started online communities to support their innovation initiatives, as these communities can strongly support innovation within those organisations through for example better knowledge sharing and idea generation. The participation rate of the community members is an essential aspect of every online community. So every activity that can potentially increase the participation rate of the community members is potentially very interesting. Scientific research on communities have shown that a strong relationship exists between offline interaction and online participation in communities. Our experience with innovation communities has also shown us that offline events generate discussion and participation in the online environments that are used to support innovation. So new ways of integrating offline and online activities can be very interesting to potentially increase participation in the community.
The idea with the Roomware project is that online information about a person can be connected to his or her presence in a real-world space during an offline event. Further integration between the online and offline identity of community members can potentially increase online participation, because offline contacts can be more easily established based on online profiles. These offline interactions tend to be continued in the online environment.
Have you ever entered an event where you don’t know a lot of people? This ‘tool’ will potentialy tell you who has the same expertise or interests by setting up a connection through bluetooth or Wifi. You can walk up to people and start an interesting conversation right away and chances are far greater that you actually leave the event with new relevant connections.
At the office we came up with an even better use of this ‘tool’. When it is installed at bars, you can check the Hyves or Facebook profiles of people at the bar, walk up to a woman and say: “I really like long walks on the beach while the sun sets. Would you like to go?”
