A few weeks ago I wrote up a post drawing attention to a trend I’m seeing around the world of ‘superhero schools’ cropping up, giving examples of these physical locations that serve as hubs for innovation and personal development. I framed it as:

superhero school. center for disruptive innovation. continuous learning zone. collective intelligence. live/work startup incubator. community center. hackerspace. makerlab. autonomous zone. permaculture and sustainable food production. cooperatively owned communications infrastructure. resilience. r&d lab. a place for creative troublemakers.

I can imagine that these locations become networked, so information and resources can flow between them, and people then have a range of options around the world to come together around short or longer term innovation projects. Pepper it with some internal currencies for the network, and it becomes quite interesting.

I recently found another word that supplements this idea – collaboratory. Originally coined in 1989 as a ‘center without walls’ for scientific research, the wikipedia page also defines it as follows:

“a collaboratory is more than an elaborate collection of information and communications technologies; it is a new networked organizational form that also includes social processes; collaboration techniques; formal and informal communication; and agreement on norms, principles, values, and rules”

At any rate, now that I’m on the lookout for superhero schools & collaboratories, I’m seeing them pop up everywhere. Just the other day, I saw this article on CNET – Peter Theil floats cash to floating tech incubator, and so discovered the Blueseed Project. Continue reading →