Dave Pollard, author of the How to Save the World blog, has refined his thinking on how to encourage wide-scale, mass collaboration to solve problems and hash out important business issues. In a recent blog posting, Pollard lays out his initial framework for AHA! centers and makes a few tweaks to the model. Here’s the basic notion of what an AHA! Discovery center would look like:

When I first thought up the idea for AHA! I envisioned a physical centre (or centres) that would attract (by reputation and by some of its physical assets and setting) some of the world’s best minds to address some of the world’s most intractable problems. Weekdays would be allocated to business problems, with companies and consortia paying a fee for the service. Weekends would be volunteer groups addressing broader social problems, at no charge, and with the experts from the weekday sessions encouraged to stay over and help deal with these broader issues. Focus was to be on complex problems, the ones that don’t lend themselves to well-established solutions and analytical thinking. Everything we produced was to be made available Open Source and Creative Commons licensed.

After thinking through and refining the problem, Pollard believes that a virtual - not a physical - AHA! discovery center would be the appropriate venue for problem-solving:

Rather than physical centres with certified AHA! practitioners, what if we reduced AHA! to its absolute essence: a set or ‘basket’ of capabilities, guiding principles, working models and tools that have been shown to work well in dealing with complex intractable problems.

This virtual workspace, says Pollard, would be “a database, a wiki, or some other simple, common place where everyone could access it and everyone could add to it.”