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EC Harris BuddySpace / Compendium / More?

Marc Eisenstadt, Tuesday 13 Jan 2004

Very interesting session today…

Eric Ostrowski of EC Harris (www.echarris.com), a consulting / knowledge brokering firm (my term, not theirs), that works extensively with (for example) the building trade, doing a lot of valuable knowledge capture (e.g. deep tradeoffs involved in building short-squat vs skinny-tall for identical cubic footage… SEE SECOND URL BELOW).

Eric had earlier been to an OU Library gig, had met Paul Quintas, wanted to come here to talk primariliy about Instant Messaging and BuddySpace… *HOWEVER*:

We spent about 3 hours together today. We talked from a very broad knowledge management / community of practice / knowledge sharing perspective about everything we do– during which I also showed him a lot of stuff, including Compendium, Magpie, BuddySpace, HexagonVO, FlashMeeting, Rostra, Meetomatic, and a few more things.

He was very interested in different funding / licensing / collaboration models for future work together, and from a general chat around these issues it looks to me like they would be good candidates for something like the early &#39LMS/D3E&#39 model, wherein they essentially paid for a &#39relationship&#39 and &#39handholding&#39 etc to help develop stuff according to their needs. Will discuss with them further. Naturally, I don&#39t believe anything until there&#39s money on the table, but this one at least looks promising, and he seems an interesting chap, with excellent &#39onward&#39 contacts, e.g. household names in the building trade etc.

We&#39ve agreed that he&#39ll come back on 11th Feb… after seeing all the stuff, what he primarily wants is a BuddySpace/Compendium combo, not a million miles from some of the CoAKTinG scenarios… though with a slightly different and interesting slant!! The plan is for some in-depth discussions with me & Simon… I discussed but did not show ENRICH and RichODL, because RichODL in particular fit exactly into some of his envisaged scenarios, so that also is something we might want to have &#39on the table&#39 for him.