I received a request from Ruben Robert to evaluate their new intermediary service called Fellowforce. This service is an intermediary, acting between innovators and companies (or 'solvers' and 'seekers'). (Updates: August 8th 2007)
Fellowforce - How does it work :
- First you will create a profile and you will be asked about your "professional area of expertise" and "industry of experience"
- After you sign in, the "My Challenge Alerts"-area will be immediately visible. I was curious to test this service and I responded to one of these challenges. Making a response or "pitching" was an easy and a comprehensible process.
- The service and especially "My Challenge Alerts" is cleverly built. Although there are currently only few challenges, Fellowforce looks very alive ;-)
- In the "Innovation Box" you can pick up a company from a list and propose them an innovation. I intend to do that. I will get back to this feature later on.
Fellowforce - Things to improve:
- Collaboration. Users of Fellowforce have no chances to communicate with each other. There is no "collaborative problem-finding and problem-solving". (Update: Fellowforce is working on that) What a pity! Those responses ('pitches') to challenges would be much better quality if there were more participants. (A dilemma in Ahonen&Lietsala's earlier paper). Of course, users ('solvers') are worried that their ideas are 'stolen', but the service could be built so that you can ask your colleagues to join in to solve problems. The reward would be automatically split by the number of solvers. Additionally, Fellowforce could act as community that creates new kind of consulting business!! + + + I am curious about those HR dimensions of Fellowforce ;-)
- Sign-in. Your Fellowforce user id is your e-mail address. (Update: Fellowforce is working on that) Convenient? Perhaps, but your e-mail address will/may be visible for external marketeers and spammers as well :-( For this reason, I selected my second, non-significant e-mail address as my user id. Fellowforce administrators should inform their users in the sign-in, how users e-mail is used/made visible.
- Terms and Conditions could be more easily visible in the hierarchy.
- Getting your reward. If you will not check you e-mail constantly, you will not receive your possible reward ( see the item 2D in previous "Terms and Conditions"). That is ... not fair! (Update: Fellowforce is working on that)
- Only E-mail. Fellowforce is too much e-mail centred. As a user of that service I would wish to receive the most important messages by SMS or by snail mail. However, in your profile, there is no address field or no mobile number field, only e-mail!! (Update: Fellowforce is working on that, telephone/ cellphone number can be added to the profile)
- RSS. For notifications, the service could use RSS, not only e-mail. This way, I could monitor my challenges with my mobile phone and it's RSS reader. I welcome the administrators of Fellowforce to look at Rok Hrastnik's RSS Diary (the blog and the book).
In overall, I have a very positive view on Fellowforce and I intend to intend to continue my experiments with the platform. Earlier my intermediary platform favourite was Ideawicket but Fellowforce is more intuitive to use. The slogan of Fellowforce is also great " This is Wikinomics in practise ". The challenge of Fellowforce is to get enough 'solvers' and 'seekers'. Let's see.
What is your opinion about Fellowforce?
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