Barcamp Indianapolis Fall 2008 Group

Barcamp Indy is currently using a barcamp.org wiki, a Google Group a Ning. These have their pros and cons, but I want to offer a more focused and action-oriented group collaboration tool: Empowerment. I've created this Empowerment group for those who are interested in using it.

What is Empowerment?
Empowerment makes apathy obsolete by helping you get things done. Empowerment's Missionpedia enables personal and collaborative GTD task management so groups of people can actually plan, assign and complete missions together.

The system also provides a host of personal empowerment tools to help you get things done. You can build your profile to find what ideas you believe in, what missions you can accomplish, what skills you need to do them and what tools to do it with.

Empowerment is being developed to help with the most important aspects of getting things done. You can track inventory of tools and materials groups need to get things done. You can disseminate skills and ideas to people who need them to tackle your group's missions.

This is the collaborative toolkit I've always wanted. We use it to manage developing itself. And it can be used to help plan barcamp!

Is Empowerment an open platform?
Empowerment is a non-commercial open-source project in development with a full-time dev team of paid and volunteer contributors. We haven't released the source yet because we're still working on getting the first version beyond beta but it will all be opened when we get around to it.

I'm clearly biased towards using these tools since I'm the founder of Empowerment, but I believe in eating one's own dogfood and using Empowerment's groupware tools to help plan a successful barcamp would be much more rewarding than just giving a talk about it.