and I’ll show you collaboration at its best! I’m sure we’ve all experienced in our off-line lives (gasp!) just how collaborative an experience story telling can be. I was particularly struck by the collaborative power of stories this past year when I gathered with 18 of my peers to share tales of the economic crisis (as part of the We20 movement ). We each listened, we each contributed. We had whiteboards and the ever important dry erase markers. We used projectors and pictures to draw the connections- and in the end all our individual narratives became one emergent story that helped us to decide a path forward.

We all agreed that this act of shared storytelling is essential for sustainability. However is our society too large and too dispersed to collaborate with the intensity needed to tell stories as a group? Well perhaps not any longer. StoryGarden is bringing the collaborative power of storytelling to the on-line world. It’s an amazing new initiative, which through a really thoughtfully designed piece of software as well as intelligent administration of that software, allows us to find the connections and patterns between our individual narratives on a grand scale. StoryGarden is just in its infancy, but if it lives up to its potential this could TRANSFORM our ability to collaborate across grand distances to really create a new, sustainable path forward.