All posts by Vas Taras
Sacona Webinar
Webinar recorded: Wednesday, April 5, 10 am New York time zone (7:30 pm New Delhi time zone) Presenter: Sachin Bharadwaj, CEO
10 things I’ve learned (and 3 things I still don’t know) after X-Culture’s 2 years and 87K followers on Facebook
More X-Culture blog posts A company Facebook page could be a great tool for promoting your business, building a community, and getting useful input from your followers. But managing it could be quite challenging, and frustrating at times. Yesterday was exactly two years since I’ve created the X-Culture page. We now have 87,000 followers…
Full Circle: Former Students Now Professors
What a pleasant surprise. I have just received a letter from a student who participated in X-Culture in 2010. Our very first cohort. She writes, “Dear Dr. Taras, … I’m contacting you because of the great experienced I had in X-Culture as a student. I’m now a professor at Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara. I would…
Plastic Revolutions
Plastic Revolutions Plant Tour and Q&A March 31, 2017
Need Your Advice on Regional Representatives
One of the issues we’ve been struggling with for some time is regional representatives. It has become especially salient since we launched X-Culture Kids – and we seek your advice. At the first glance, X-Culture does not need regional representatives. Our very simple recruitment strategy has worked very well. The number of applications has been…
Webinar with X-Culture Coaches
Time: Wednesday, March 29, 9 am to 10 am New York time zone Participants: X-Culture Coaches Tim van der Meijde Vas Taras Agenda: Meet and Greet Update Coaches on how 2017-1 round of X-Culture going so far Challenges and interesting stories from this semester Areas where Coaches can help most Coaches share their own experiences, observations, suggestions…
Roads? Where we’re going we don’t need roads.
by Vas Taras Open-source collaboration and crowd sourcing – the principles at heart of X-Culture – have already changed a number of industries. Conspicuously, however, business research, education, and consulting are stuck in the “do it in the house” paradigm. We think we can change that. It would make sense to first share how X-Culture started. It’s…
Exceeding All Limits
COMING SOON X-Culture handles an enormous amount of email correspondence. Our email accounts (admin@X-Culture.оrg and v_tаrаs@uncg.edu) must be more internationally connected emails in the world. I am not exaggerating. On a given day, each account receives 200-300 emails from an average of 25-30 countries. And at least once a week, we sent out about 10,000…
Garbage In, Garbage Out
COMING SOON X-Culture collects immense amounts of data. Over 2,000 variables. Multi-Level. Multi-Source. Multi-Method. Longitudinal. We have weekly surveys of all X-Culture participants. However, much of it is self-report questionnaires. As we learned the hard way, self-report questionnaires are tricky. It’s not that people intentionally lie. But the threat to validity of the data posed…
Free-Riding (a.k.a., social loafing, shirking, WETing, free-loading)
COMING SOON The biggest, and really only real problem in team-based projects is free-riding. It happens always and a lot. Studies show that up to 30% of all team members, regardless of age, profession, or compensation, work less than expected by their team. In X-Culture, we started off with the usual free-riding rate of about…