5 Lessons in Building a Community from….a Community

The best collaboration building efforts achieve a perfect mix of top-down structure, conveying strategy and purpose of the effort, while allowing bottom-up influence to determine how the details of that effort play out. The Bankside Urban Forest, an inspiring urban design and community project in London, adopted a process that balances top-down and bottom-up methodology creating an environment that encourages a strong, collaborative community in the enterprise.

This talk will use The Bankside project as a case study to illustrate 5 principals that apply to building any type of community

1. A design thinking approach
2. Use of ethnography 
3. Community based around the needs of the members
4. Approaching top-down management as "Commander's Intent"
5. Allowing the effort to be a community by the people with strong bottom-up influence

Dwayne is a leader in the strategy and design of information solutions and products. Since 1995 he has led creative teams to deliver elegant interfaces to complex systems for world-class clients including Stanford University, Cisco Systems, Boeing, the US Armed Forces and Mercy Corps among others. Dwayne is a skilled strategist, team leader and innovator delivering many pioneering "firsts" in the online environment including real-time home loan applications, first web-based high resolution printing engine and the first online credit report for consumers.

Gestalt Effect designs collaborative experiences. We help organizations identify the value of better collaboration and build strategies for new working experiences for their teams by aligning process, data and technology meaningfully.