Question: What do sweatshirts, lapel pins, and conference bags have in common?
Answer: They enable self-organization.
Most group meetings are organized by someone - a meeting planner, a conference organizer, an alumni department - some type of organizer. Someone must schedule the meeting and then communicate to the group, and the people in the group must then plan to attend. A reliable (and necessary) process, but also inefficient. Centralized Organization.
But when you give the individual members a badge, they can find each other WITHOUT this centralized organization; without the meeting planner. They can SELF-ORGANIZE. It seems basic, and in fact it is. When you recognize someone with your college sweatshirt on, you tend to talk to them. A fellow Cardinals fan wearing the red ball-cap. A fellow colleague wearing the company lapel pin. These badges are tools to find people of common affinity, and they work very well. They enable decentralized organization.
Now, what if you could wear ALL of your badges at the same time? Hundreds of badges, wherever you go. Turn them on, turn them off. What if any member of your group could recognize you, even if you were in a large crowd, or separated by walls? Wireless badges, invisible badges, x-ray badges.
We think of ourselves as the wireless sweatshirt - an invisible beacon. Jambo is the invisible lapel pin. We don’t need no stinkin’ badges.