Professional Collaboration

	"If coaches and consultants could share expertise and access to clients, most of the things we need to do would be possible." Professional Collaboration (A private list to discuss how we might help each other, opened April, 2009)

Is this a new discussion. Is online collaboration possible, or is this just too hard?

If you are a business consultant or coach you are invited to share your ideas.

39 people have joined this discussion. I'm impressed by the quality of those people and the experience that they bring to the conversation.

The discussion has started. There are three main voices:
David Archer who trying to link technical professionals.
Lizz Pellet tells us that we must build strong networks based on written agreements; partnerships.
Mawuna Koutonin makes the point that the act of referring work or clients to other people builds your own reputation.

When you have joined you will see that there are already posts to read. New blood is welcome. Of course you may post on any of the topics or introduce your own.

If you could be part of a team, it should be possible for you to provide more effective service to your clients, and to be more certain that whatever the problems your clients have, someone in the group will be able to help. The keyword I keep coming back to is USEFUL. When you offer services to your clients you should be useful to that client. When we form a professional group, our aim as members is to be useful to the group.

But then again it depends on who the group is doesn't it? So let us find out.

We are using an email list tool called Online Groups. Whatever coaching or consulting work you are doing, sometime soon you are going to need to use a simple list like this in your work, so a little bonus for you is that you'll get to use Online Groups in a practical way. Then when you next have that need you'll know where to go.

If you register here, you'll join a public area called "An Introduction to Collaboration Using Online Groups". The actual group you are joining is called "Open Discussion" inside a subdomain of Online Groups called "Veech".

There is an opportunity to complete a personal profile inside Online Groups, that other people can see. About half of the members have put time and effort into making excellent profiles. That's very encouraging. You will be impressed by the quality of the people, and that's even more important than the numbers.

When this page was first written I had three paragraphs here about how i thought things might develop. I've removed those paragraphs. I'm not sure where this discussion is heading. But I am confident of making slow progress.

Thanks so much for your encouragement.
Several people have said that given the economic downturn the timing for this is initiative is just right.
I hope we can show each other new ways to be useful to our own clients and new ways for us all to earn income.

"John Stephen Veitch"
Google the above name if you want to see what I've been doing for the last 10 years.