Project Collaboration=Success

Well the first night for my new series of training in Ottawa with my partners Susan Murphy and Patti Church has come and gone. At first collaboration can be scary, and it was because now I had to wait and listen to others and trust they knew things too. But hey these women were awesome so what I'm saying is, collaboration can work. Believe it or not it can even make things go smoother. If you can find just the right partners it can be AWESOME. In fact it was so funny that yesterday Sue, after a flurry of emails back and forth, all agreeing with one another on numerous topics, jokingly sent out a message to us saying "it's unfortunate the three of us can never agree on anything."

Thanks to these 2 ladies our very first NightTime@TheCodeFactory was a big success. We sold out our crowd and packed the room. We even added a kids table. The night was a real taste-tester with me starting off by making people's minds, in their words, "explode" with creativity. In just 10 minutes people had met each other, had created 6 new businesses (using a skipping rope, a golf ball, a moosehead journal, an air pump, and a golden key), played with crayons, and had a few laughs along the way.

Sue then took the floor and she wowed the crowd by doing Twitter, Facebook, and Blogging in the "real" world. With just a few questions Sue was able to show how easy any of these can be. "Write something about yourself that we need to know in a sentence or two", "is there anything you are really passionate about?" these are the types of questions she asked and related everyone's answers to one of the aforementioned social media tools above.

Patti wrapped up the taste-testing with her spin on some office gems by turning them in business jewels. Patti demonstrated how to use Prezi to do a kick ass presentation. She then recorded her session using Jing, showing everyone how easy it can be to record a session and use it later. Only to end her session with a quick peak at how people can organize themselves instead of sending out a million emails by using Doodle.

Overall we think the census was that the night went well and that we should continue offering these sessions.

I can say from my perspective I had a lot of fun in this scenario and everything went off without any frustration. In fact everything about this collaboration went so well that we decided to collaborate over a nice cool drink at the end of the evening.

Way to go team-hurray for us and working together so well.

Looking forward to working more on our, already re-branded, series which will be called The Third Place (The 3rd Place) [still working out some details).