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ShareVision Blog

Conversations on technology for community service providers

The Digital Mesh from Rome with Love

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A vacation is indeed an incredible luxury, a thing once taken only by the elite classes and not even coined as a concept until around the time of the Norman Conquest. Of course these days you are hard pressed to book anything for your vacation now matter how big or small without the use of the Internet. The Internet has long ago replaced travel agents and the world seems to be more often than not, using sharing economy style bookings on sites such as Air BnB. With every very new airline booking, accommodation reservation, or online communiqué post, you will be asked endlessly to log in and create a new account. I have been noticing that more and more often I am being given the option to log on via another service, usually Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, or LinkedIn. In fact on some applications it is now difficult to log in WITHOUT going through another site, usually a social media service.

At first this may seem suspicious – why should one share their profile information with someone else if you do not need to? Won’t they now be snooping through my contacts, my search history? My link with the Communist Party?  Relax, because apparently we are embarking on one of the most important technologies for businesses and consumers to come along yet…the digital mesh. This term, coined by Gartner Fellow and Vice President David Cearley, and the concept behind it will apparently be changing all of our lives for the better.

Oh and BTW this is a good service for our clients, our organizations, and for us as consumers too. Big Brother is just inevitable don’t you know. According to the website Tech Soup, the Digital Mesh as a new technology is really great news for the NGO sector if we get on board and update our websites to offer the right design….

The digital mesh creates an ambient user experience, where users can access accounts and perform tasks online with fewer steps and interruptions. It’s becoming a norm with many businesses and we predict the nonprofit sector will imitate this trend when it comes to designing their websites or other online platforms (e.g., allowing donors to use one account for all fundraising events). 

Why is this important? In 2015, the average user attention span decreased to 8 seconds (lower than that of a goldfish, at 8.5 secs!). This means the fluidity of the digital mesh will help keep users on your site and improve conversions.

[TIP] The digital mesh is also growing alongside increased mobile use, and mobile donations in particular. This means nonprofits should invest in responsive web design, which adapts text and image sizes to the screen size of the user in order to maintain a consistent user experience.”

So eventually we will succumb to the pressure, we will all get used to signing in only once somewhere through a preferred service that we trust, which will “digitally mesh” us to others, and we will then of course have our needs taken care of. We will be able to use our electronic ID to book hotels effortlessly for sure, but if we set it up, we will also allow our supporters to both follow us on Facebook and to donate to us with ease. All with a single swipe if you will.

Soon enough though I predict we will be simply implanting a tracking chip at birth with a permanent ID code and digital meshing will be that much easier, for Big Brother and non-profits alike.

For further Reading on Digital Meshing: http://www.strategyblocks.com/blog/is-the-digital-mesh-the-next-enterprise-technology-must-have/

Topics: Technology non-profit