In Between Meetings- A Brainstorming Tool

Saturday morning, I laid in bed, one hand holding the blankets tight up to my neck and the other holding my blackberry. As I was reviewing my task items, I had a brainstorm related to the Leadership Corvallis project I'm in on.

My knee jerk instinct was to email it or twitter it. Unfortunately, not everyone in my project group is following me on twitter, and contextually, most of my twitter followers wouldn't get it, and even if they did, it wouldn't seem twitter-worthy. As far as email, people could reply to all and comment, but that ultimately leads to a mess of email replies from different senders and in the end it will get deleted from the inbox.

It got me thinking about what kind of collaboration tools are available for corporate workgroups or non-profit boards/committees to contribute content via mobile phone.

Imagine this- at our first group meeting, our group leader collects a list of everyone's mobile phone, along with the obligatory email list. Then, the leader registers a unique domain such as pep.ideate.com Once that is set up, as group members think of ideas, comments, talking points, etc, they can simply text (SMS) them to this group domain.

The domain would have similar functionality to Twitter, but instead aggregate all submissions into a group feed. You could even program a feature to the site whereby people can receive SMS updates when someone posts something, and then reply directly to that post. It would look something like this on the feed:

@chris "I think we ought to consider not buying a van- maybe we can develop a pass with the local cab company."
--->Jim " The problem with that is, after the cards are gone, the non-profit will have to fundraise again for more cards.
--->Lauren " True, but the van will have fixed costs that will require additional funds as well- it will be tough to raise enough up front to cover all future costs"
@Lauren "What if we sold advertising to local companies prior to purchasing the van, and then wrap the van with their logos"
--->Carrie " that could work, but we'd have to charge a lot to cover the purchase
and it may be tough with the economy like it is."

Rough example, but you get the idea. When the next board/group meeting rolls around, it's very easy for the chair to summarize the ideas and discussion that happened since the previous meeting, and put together a meaningful agenda for the meeting. All ideas and comments are captured in a timeline- conversational flow. Part twitter, part gmail.

As a standalone solution, I don't think this has legs, but as a bolt on feature for enterprise intranets(Think Jive's Clearspace or MS Sharepoint), I think it could add a lot of value, especially with the proliferation of SMS amongst the 20 and 30 somethings.

Maybe this is mental gymnastics, but I think Twitter is on to something, it just doesn't have the right functionality for group and/or business application.

Cheers