#irchat

I am reading a great book titled Crowdsourcing: Why the Power of the Crowd is Driving the Future of Business by Jeff Howe who is a contributing editor of Wired Magazine. This is a great book which reminds me in many ways of my favorite book of all time The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki who is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

The common thread between both books is that collective wisdom of the crowd produces better results than the smartest person in the crowd is capable of producing on their own.

I have been speaking with many very smart people lately in order to get feedback for a new technology platform that I am in the process of bringing to the market. I have been blown away by how much I have learned in a relatively short period of time. I have had fantastic conversations with people from the United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, the UK, Germany, South Africa and Nigeria. I met all of these great people on Twitter. It blows my mind to think that a social media application that I had never used until April of 2009 could help me network and uncover such a vast amount of information from such a diverse population in such a short period of time.

It also struck me that Twitter could be much more powerful if the crowd converged in the same place at the same time. I have been able to pick up valuable information largely when I happen to be on Twitter at or about the same time as someone else. I figured that if I could encourage others to show up at the same time the exchange of information and ideas would happen much faster and would benefit many more people. I also suspect that it will encourage some of the quiet observers to come forward and voice their opinions, ask questions and contribute to the shared learning experience.

I am going to hold a weekly chat session on Twitter called #irchat which will be held every Thursday at 1:00 PM EST. I would like to have people send me questions or topics that they would like to discuss during the chat session. You can DM me on Twitter with your suggestions. I have no idea how many questions I will receive or how many people will tune in to the session so I expect that the chat session will probably change over time but for now I am planning to conduct the session for 1 hour. I will present 6 questions or topics to the group and we can spend 10 minutes per topic.

Please invite your friends and colleagues to join the #irchat sessions as everyone will benefit from a larger and more diverse group of participants.