WHY ARE VILLAGES so brilliant at channeling their energies and resources? And why are corporations so crap?

That was the question that boffin ethnographer Charles Armstrong wanted to answer. So he went to live on a Scilly island for a year and watched how the 80 villagers of St Agnes operated. Then he came home again, and tried to capture that essence in software.

The result was the Trampoline Enterprise social computing platform. In theory it’s a Face book-like set of tools that would let people in big organisations collaborate to give their glorious employer cutting edge competitiveness.

The first aplication for this platfrom, Flightdesk, did all the social networking stuff. Now Trampoline has launched Dashboard, which allows IT managers, or CIOs, or information evangelists, to examine those relationships. It automatically maps out if Larry is talking to Leroy, if Murray is sharing with Mary, and if Ronnie is collaborating with Rakesh. This gaves a snap shot of how the information flows around the organisation, explained Armstrong.

It’s all about mapping the human capital, and getting the most out of relationships.

All sounded almost plausible.

“We can identify a new group of opinion formers. Thought leaders,” he said. “We call them Information Brokers.”

Information brokers? Hang on, he’s gone too far now. Maybe we should ask some questions. Surely a business system that models itself on village life shouldn’t invent phrases like ‘information brokers’. Surely there’s already terms for those people who know everybody’s business. Busybody, Gossip. Mrs Honeymoon.

Now we think of it. There’s something else that doesn’t add up. Where are the disputes, grudges and long running feuds. Surely, if businesses ran like villages, then Hamish in marketing won’t have spoken to Billy in the post room, because of a dispute that goes back generations.

Nothing about that in Dashboard. Oh well, everyone back on the Trampoline.

Is there such thing as social intelligence? µ