Futurescaper is a tool for collaboratively creating and analysing crowd-sourced systems maps. The purpose of doing this is to better understand the dynamics of a complex problem domain, where many different perspectives are required to get a complete picture. It's not really about annotating documents; more about getting people to tell stories in ways that can be converted into causal graphs, which then can be combined with each other to produce a detailed map of the possibility space, which can then be inform strategic planning. If that makes any sense!
Our biggest customer is the United Nations, which uses it for projects like this one: http://www.la.one.un.org/media-center/publications/252-un-su...
The advantage of doing in this way is that it explicitly encourages the people who interact with it to take more of a systems approach to their thinking, helping to surface hidden root causes and predict unintended consequences or emergent knock-on effects.
It's a bit of an odd company, but happened kind of accidentally: just a weekend coding project (to assist a friend's dissertation on crowdsourced scenario planning) which spun badly out of control.
http://www.la.one.un.org/images/publications/Analysis_UN_sur...
It looks very interesting indeed. Is it potentially suitable for NGOs, and if so, are there any plans of making some of it available for such nonprofits? I ask partly because I'd love to get my hands on this (and do run an NGO I could use as an excuse ;)).
RE list, thanks for the link, I didn't know about this work. I'll try to dig through it after work today.
Thanks for pointing out the issues with subdividing systems innovations and knock-on effects. I guess I've assumed that building a comprehensive list would be easier than it is. Still, something is better than nothing, and even by just looking at the HN discussions, I can see that there are many people with skills who would like to quit doing bullshit jobs, but don't know where to look for impactful work matching their skillsets or interests. This is an area I believe needs improving.
In this subthread I asked for ideas to start a rough list. If such a list was to be turned into a kind of reference for people, it would need to be continuously maintained. As you pointed out, you often can't predict which innovations will turn out impactful or not. The landscape constantly changes. But if we can't predict things well in advance, the least we can do is to try and track them and keep revising best guesses about their evolution.
I'm trying to understand what your other company does. From what I can tell from the website, you're selling some kind of framework for collecting and collaboratively sorting/annotating documents, and for on-line surveys? Is there any less business-speak overview available somewhere?