IdeaLoom is our flagship Collective Intelligence platform, which allows large communities to hold a meaningful conversation at scale, converge to a common understanding, and elaborate solutions beyond what each participant could have envisioned.
IdeaLoom allows a structured navigation through conversations on complex issues, through a unique synthesis of social software and iterative concept mapping. IdeaLoom hosts (or imports) conversations in a traditional threaded forum. Then, designated participants identify key ideas in the conversation and build a dynamic concept map of the conversations. The concept map provides a shared reference point for the content of the conversation, and allows participants to navigate to relevant parts of the conversation without wading through all messages. This way, the conversation can scale up and include contributions from busy participants who would not have read the whole conversation. Read a detailed description of the features on the IdeaLoom site.
IdeaLoom was originally developed at Bluenove under the name of Assembl, by Marc-Antoine Parent, Benoit Grégoire, Jean-Michel Cornu with the help of Caravan. (Read the full history here.) Assembl's design benefitted from a European project with partners coming from Open University and MIT, and was trialed with Purpose, OECD, Ashoka, etc. It was then used by Bluenove with large corporations and organizations, such as French national electricity (EDF), railways (SNCF), the city of Paris, etc.
Conversence is now developing IdeaLoom further using Assembl as a basis, and is committed to making it into the reference platform for collaborative collective intelligence as well as the foundation of our collective intelligence services.