FutureChallenges wins German Award for Online Communication

This year marks the second time that the German Award for Online Communication has been presented in Berlin. We are proud and deeply honored that the distinguished jury has given FutureChallenges.org the award in the “Internal Communication” category, putting us ahead of leading German corporations like Bayer, Daimler and Deutsche Post.

The German Online Communication Awards Ceremony. Photo taken by Mario Sorgalla, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

For us online communication is an absolutely essential part of coordinating work between our headquarters in Gütersloh, our Washington, D.C. bureau, external agencies and our worldwide network of bloggers. We make extensive use of a large chest of tools for different purposes – including Wikis, Google Docs, Google Hangouts, communication over multiple Google Groups, text editing on our wordpress-based platform and EtherPads. Nearly all the communication and collaboration of everybody involved in the projects is internet-based and decentralized as any centralized form of control would restrict the ability of our worldwide network of bloggers to report on the immediate effects of global interdependencies in their own regions.

The German Online Communication Award, Photo taken by Mario Sorgalla, CC BY-NC-SA 3.0

The FutureChallenges.org project has benefited enormously from the participation of a great many people of different cultural backgrounds from many different countries. This Award for Internal Online Communication honors our achievement and spurs us on to maintain our vital fluid network and extend it still further. A heartfelt “thank you!” to everyone who has helped make the project what it is ever since FutureChallenges.org was first launched in 2009!