After the launch of the new Society 3.0 book yesterday in Eindhoven, I had the chance to chat about a software product that Seats2Meet uses for their co-working space: The Serendipity Machine. In short, it turns their co-working space into a social network and lifts the whole concept up to a completely new level.

The Serendipity Machine is about finding people who can help you. If you are building your product and need a website, you can see if there’s somebody with that skill in the room or at another Seats2Meet site. This fits perfectly into the Society 3.0 mindset: do things for others and they’ll do things for you. Together, you can build what you want without having to pay corporations to do it for you.

All the other aspects of the Seats2Meet co-working space are enablers. You can pick a place for free, use the free Wi-Fi and drink a few cups of the free coffee. Everything to attract crowds is free. The more people join in, the higher the chances that you can find somebody who can help you. Only when you rent a meeting room, you pay per person.

The software of the Serendipity Machine is simple, which has advantages and disadvantages. Skills are tags that you attach to your profile. I think tags are great because they are so easy to use and they fit the purpose of Seats2Meet just right. For business purposes, though, they might not be sufficient. Jef Staes proposes a Competence Playlist and I’m helping him work out how that might be implemented. Validation of your competences by others is crucial in the playlist. At the same time, the competence playlist must evolve quickly: what you did yesterday may not be what you want to do tomorrow. There’s some work to be done to get it right, but it’s nice to see others are thinking in the same direction.