In a world of myriad platforms, we have chosen one. Drawn from the genius of a self-proclaimed "cowboy" and his team, excentriQ is the result of years of iteration, improvement, creation. It aims to serve a community – the scattered innovators who lurk within the vast hierarchy of Quebec's largest financial institution – in order to draw ideas, bottom up, to make for a more dynamic, a more competitive, a more human cooperative credit union.

For the first time, excentriQ is being shared. An act of generosity, some could think, this unique interface has been ousted from its birthplace, reconfigured  reprogrammed for an excentric community of creatives, a platform like an experiment.

Such spaces serve many purposes: they are meant to make us inherently more collaborative, yet they rely on our good will in order to truly function. They are, indeed, strange beasts. As they build with us (and, some would say, for us) repositories of knowledge, they also act as activators of de facto relationships. They allow us to reveal some of our true selves a bit further. To jokingly explore the confines of our tortured minds. And put in writing and in images, things that we'll see.

This text is part of a series written in the context of the Fifth edition of the Montreal-Barcelona Summer School on Management of Creativity, organized by Mosaic HEC Montréal and Universitat Barcelona, July 9 to 24, 2013.
Illustration by Studio 923a. Read all posts in the series at blog.fandco.ca/yulbcn.