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An Introduction to Catalyst Catalyst is a "place emulating software" for conversations using the ability of the Internet to allow us to "gather" in one place for interacting with each other. Often,
someone using Catalyst will have an ensemble of such places such as
board meeting, senior managers' meeting, work groups that cut across
organizational lines, and client spaces where an internal team can
work with an external client Or a graduate school might have a collection of seminars, a meeting space for seminar leaders and another for all the grad students for totally open conversations. Arranging the ensemble of conversations is an architectural issue, and the architecture should be integrated into the organization's web presence, and the web presence should be well deigned in congruence with a overall - hopefully - well articulated strategy. Among other things, this means that Catalyst looks different for different groups. For example, the New England Small Farms Institute's Catalyst Center looks like:
While "The Great Works" Conference organized by EarthTies looked like:
Catalyst conversation spaces refers to online group discussions. BigMindMedia developed Catalyst, as a state of the art software based on an emerging sense of what the most effective on line environments can be. New Stories uses Catalyst as its main conversation and conferencing software. Catalyst can support many different kinds of conversations and conferences. For example, a meeting on Business might include conversation topics such as Marketing, Business Ethics, Job Hunting Tips, etc. Or these could be conversations on the state of knowledge held within departments in a university, or discussions of civic issues by a community learning how to function as an Internet Democracy. Discussions in a Catalyst space are asynchronous. That is, they unfold over a period of time, and a participant does not have to be online in order for someone else to read and respond to a message. So a message posted on Monday may be read by one person immediately, another person on Friday, and another person 4 months later. Any one of these people can also post a response. This also creates a history of the conversations, since these messages are stored for retrieval on demand by any user in the conversation. The hot ideas in the world of organization buzz are participation, the spread of knowledge, the learning organization, and the creation of communities of practice among those who share common work. Catalyst is designed to help create the right infrastructure for the support of on-line team based environments. More than email, the responses are arranged like the script of a play, are searchable, and attractively presented. Trust is built in the group as everyone realizes that each person sees the conversation in exactly the same order and completeness.
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