Extending the Conversation

Connecting the Dots

Collaborative undertakings entail making fresh connections, not just across disciplines, but across social, cultural and institutional orientations. At the Law Lab, we are exploring new ways for acquiring and organizing knowledge, expertise, and creativity in an effort to bring multiple viewpoints to bear on highly complex and interdisciplinary issues. Effective problem-solving necessitates not just making connections across sectors, but also at different levels of detail and points of specialization. The goal is to stimulate new conversations that can yield effective collaboration and substantive innovation.

While technologies that facilitate the acquisition and sharing of content are vital enablers, web crawlers, taggers, RSS, aggregators, wikis, and blogs are insufficient in building the human bonds — based on trust and affinity — that can foster real breakthroughs. Effectively “connecting the dots” requires dynamic social relationships that can straddle both the online and the physical world.

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