October 2004

Soren Kaplan, co-founder of iCohere, manages online events and communities for many large and small organizations.

Tell me about icohere? What do you do?

iCohere helps organizations create collaborative communities, which we classify into three types of communities learning communities, communities of practice, and project communities. We've applied our backgrounds in education and organizational development and built a software platform that includes a suite of group process and collaboration tools that help people foster relationships, collaboratively learn together, create new knowledge, and work together remotely.

Much of our work bridges the online world with face-to-face meetings and events. I just returned from a meeting with the Environmental Protection Agency, for example, in which over 300 senior leaders met for a four-day leadership development summit in Philadelphia. Now we're helping this distributed group continue to collaborate online by establishing a community of practice to sustain their momentum. Some of our other clients include organizations like SBC Communications, the National Institutes of Health, Case Western Reserve University, World Vision, and the American Society of Association Executives.