Coordinating without controlling…what are your thoughts?

This is my first post about Stanford. We should celebrate. While you are thinking about how to celebrate, I’ll talk a bit about my conundrum.

So, Stanford is just about the coolest place to work. It is replete with smart, driven, and entrepreneurial people. Stanford is a place where you can have a brilliant idea and make it come to life by tapping the wealth of resources across campus and in the valley. What this means too is that a lot of people at Stanford a doing a lot of cool things…but not always together. And that’s the conundrum.

A few colleagues and I are looking for ways to better coordinate educational technology initiatives across campus. One colleague and I are talking about (re)starting a monthly meetup of ed tech people. Another colleague and I are working on a database of ed tech people at Stanford, what they do, their areas of expertise, etc. Each of these efforts is intended to increase collaboration among the brilliant and hard-working folks who support educational technology at Stanford and to encourage us to coordinate to make great things happen.

How can you help? I want to know: What have you done or seen that was an effective coordination tactic? I don’t want us to try to control these disparate groups or get in the way of the incredible work each does. Our goal is coordination, not control. So, what are your thoughts and ideas?

1o University of London Symphony Orchestra 1967 image from FlickrCC user Paul Ealing 2011, used with permissions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.