2007-07-20 Face

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Be sure to read: http://www.horsepigcow.com/2007/07/15/the-gift/

Could the MarketEconomy? survive without the GiftEconomy?

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2007-05-08 Face

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Business and Open source

This Editorial from mark Hinkle on Enterprise Open Source Magazine, this essay from William Hurley and also a recent story in Slashdot, provide some interesting food for thought about the convergence of OpenSource software and traditional business.

The Editorial by Hinkle points out the growing trend among large corporations in employing OpenSource software as the basis of their products and services.

Hurley talks about how a lot of the businesses active in the OpenSource realm are taking from the communities, without really giving back:

Let’s use the monitoring segment of systems management as an example. Several “open source contributors” simply download code from popular projects and then “build” their software, service, or company on top of it. These contributors often refer to “improvements” they’ve made. Where are these improvements? Why weren’t they contributed to the community from which they took the code? Open source should be about working together for common benefit.

Nagios is one of the most popular monitoring projects in open source, and one of the most abused. There are countless projects, products, and services predicated on the Nagios code base—some symbiotic, others non-contributing parasites. What separates legitimate use from outright exploitation? Where would you draw the line? Should violators be black-listed by the community?

To me, open means that everyone can participate on a level playing field. As a community we have to take the good with the bad, but I cringe when I see a project taking more than its fair share of punishment. How will the community address this problem? Should there be a rating system? A sort of mooch-o-meter to rank companies and projects that use open source? Would that subjective hierarchy help or hurt the community? How would it be regulated?

The community has to answer some of these questions if open source is to continue to flourish. Everyone who leads, participates in, or utilizes an open source project should realize they have a personal interest in protecting it from abuse. Keeping the pirates honest will take effort, but the repercussions of apathy will affect us all in the future. Besides, tales of the pirate hunters are often more exciting than the tales of the pirates themselves.

The Slashdot article has some interesting comments about some of the companies that do give back to the OpenSource community, such as IBM, and Ubuntu, how they accomplish their programs in a business environment. Importantly, comments in the Slashdot article also discuss how many existing and long established OpenSource projects have been influenced, positively and negatively, but the introduction of MoneyIncentives?, SoftwareBounty? programs, and large amounts of funding.

Some key points and debates from the Slashdot article comments:

Centralized vs. P2P in the face of complexity?

• The issue isn’t about whether too much money or commercialization is killing open source software (culture/roots/projects). It seems to me that the root cause has to do with the nature of the widely publicized open source projects. As open operating systems (Linux, NetBSD?, etc.) and applications (Mozilla/Firefox, OpenOffice?, etc.) grow in complexity, they outstrip the abilities of ad hoc, grass roots “open source” organizations to develop and maintain them. Simply put any serious, valuable, widely-used open source project today is very likely a large and complicated one. Open Source has outgrown its own infrastructure and the only one available that can pick up the projects and move them forward are those operated by commercial organizations with the resources to throw at these hard problems.

vs.

• As projects become larger and more complex, they outstrip the ability of anything but a decentralised network of programmers. The resources of a traditional centralised software company, even the biggest in the business, is nothing compared to what decentralised networks of programmers have. The linux kernel team being one excellent example. And commercial software houses - many of them - are definitely involved, but the model is still distributed. No single company could handle that task - a widely distributed team from all around the world, with both commercial and noncommercial interests contributing, can and does. Projects that attempt to decentralise their development while still retaining a monolithic structure internally may find that doesnt work so well, of course. For this to work the project must follow the ‘unix way’ and have many more-or-less self contained modules that work together, rather than building monolithic do-everthing apps. Not everyone seems to grok that yet, but give it time.

How money affects Innovation vs. Refinement

• Gnome is a big project. There is a lot of code, and a lot of it is showing its age. If Gnome was an all volunteer effort, there would be a lot more focus on exciting new technologies, and less focus on fixing bugs and cleaning up old code. In a sense, this is how I see KDE. KDE is pushed forward by developing new projects and applications, but to a certain degree suffers from the fact that things are constantly being reinvented rather than refined. The hard work that has gone into Gnome by commercialization has helped reduced bugs in the code, kept it up to date, and continues to push the project forward.

Open Business Models and Open Source Software

One of the primary reasons we see these issues arising, is because the BusinessModel? of the companies creating software and services based on OpenSource software is often not and OpenBusinessModel.

OpenSource software will tend to work better with OpenBusinessModel organization.

Why? Because OpenBusinessModel organization is designed to reciprocate equal value back to contributors, whether they be individuals, or traditional business entities.

OpenBusinessModel organization optimizes OpenValueNetwork exchanges. Participants actively create a KnolwedgeCommons? as part of the business process. The divisions between all participants in the ValueChain, and BusinessCycle? are lowered, so that feedback and knowledge can flow throughout the system. Some of this is accomplished by the Lincense (example: ObmLicense). Some of this accomplished via a contract, or agreement, that sorts out the license and reciprocation details. People can still participate without contracts or agreements. However, there is incentive of course to be rewarded for working under an agreement that rewards for the exact same contribution.

How is this accomplished:

• Focus on the problems taht need to be solved, and not on the amount of money that needs to be made.
• Avoid creating un-needed monolithic organizations that suck up resources. Instead, try to make every participant and actor an equal partner in the venture, based on a fair value for their contribution. Make tracking of contributions open and accountable when when possible.
• Give feedback and input from developers, users, and funders (or funder/users) equal ground.
• Show the licenses that will be employed, and the agreements made whenver possible.
• Turn “competitors” into co-collaborators by creating reciprocating connections between KnowledgeCommons. The only “competitors” this will not work with are those who refuse to share the knowledge they have built up in their usage and employment

– SamRose

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2007-04-07 Face

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WIIFM? "What's In It For Me?"

A few years ago, I had a conversation with a friend, who I believe prefers not to be named online, about using a particular question to help frame thinking about people’s motivations for their behavior and actions. The question, probably familiar to many people, is WiiFM (“What’s In It For Me?”).

For example, you could look at a situation where there is a company that is polluting a river, and a group of people are protesting the pollution in front of the company headquarters. What is the perceived benefit for the people who are doing the polluting? And what is the perceived benefit for the people who are protesting the polluting? You may not ever know exactly what people are thinking, but asking these questions gives you a way to start thinking about world views of other people. What’s more, the external view of what is “in it” for someone often looks different than our internal view of what is “in it” for us.

AIBU? ("Am I Being Used?")

Another question that my friend who shall not be named suggested that people should start asking themselves is “Am I Being Used?” (AiBu). This question is not meant to be a vast philosophical exploration. It is meant to be a simple question: In your own view, are you being taken advantage of? Are You being Used in a particular situation or arrangement? Also, I would not pretend to define to you what “being used” means for you. You have to live with the consequences of how you anwser AiBu, so it’s up to you to define what “being used” means to you. Just like WiiFM, external and internal views of the same question can look drastically different.

Another friend, named HowardRheingold, recently blogged about an article by TreborScholz? that looks at how a PassionateUser of SocialNetwork sites like MySpace, YouTube, FaceBook, etc voluntarily donate their creations, attention, and labor to be commodified by the companies that maintain these sites. Trebor also writes:

The picture of net publics--being used--is, however, complicated by the fact that participants undeniably get a lot out of their participation. There is the pleasure of creation and mere social enjoyment. Participants gain friendships and a sense of group belonging. They share their life experiences and archive their memories. They are getting jobs, find dates and arguably contribute to the greater good.

When people look at their activities online, and ask “Am I Bing Used?”, they are asking whether the trade off they are making for giving up the rights and value of their attention, in exchange for connecting with people, and being given space to create socialize is worth the value they are giving up heir control over.

The question that OpenBusinessModelsWikiHive asks is:

Can people partake in the value of social connection and creativity WITHOUT trading off the rights to their attention or creativity?

I believe that they can. The question is, how?

Some possibilities include:

• FreeCulture: The idea that service providers recognize that people by default own the rigths to all of their content, and that they decide what to do with those rights. Not the other way around. You don’t ask people to give up rights to content they create as a precondition to accessing your online spaces.
• RevenueSharingModel: If you want to monetize people’s time, attention, and creativity, the very, very least you can do is share some of the profit and spoils with them.
• FLOSS (Free/Libre Open Source Software). One of the amazing things about FLOSS is that it increasingly makes the SocialCurrency? and Value exchanges possible without being stuck with using the services of corporations that want you to trade off the rights to your creations, your time, and yor attention. It is now possible to create your own social networks, you ar own photo and movie sharing, your own KnowledgeCommons and SocialBookmarking, your own ProjectManagement, and more. The cost of server space is relatively inexpensive. The same functions and features and performance can be had, and you can make your own rules.

Tags: floss, revenuesharingmodel, trebor_scholz, smartmobs, freeculture, openbusiness, biopsychosocial, psychology, worldview

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2007-03-27 Face

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Black Gold

I watched the movie Black Gold last night with my wife. This movie looks at the plight of very poor Ethiopians growing some of the best coffee in the world, and receiving very little to none of the profit, because of all of the middle men between them and the market. The movie’s website encourages people to work with the OxFam Fair Trade project to help cut out these market middle men and help poor farmers receive a fair price for their products.

The movie also mentioned a factoid of sorts: that if trade was increased with the continent of Africa by just 1%, that create an amount of money that is 5 times greater than the amount of money that is now sent by the world to Africa as aid. This would eliminate the need for aid to be sent to Africa.

Buying Cooperative

This thread in the forums of blackgoldmovie.com discusses an issue that popped into my mind while watching the movie: that it would be great to be able to buy directly from the farmers, pay the shipping, etc, and cut out the middle men entirely.

Despite some responses in that thread, I think this actually would be possible. I think it would be possible by creating a Cooperative, or rather , more specifically, a BuyingCooperative? that makes the whole process of getting coffee to you tranpsarent. So that you know where the money goes. The BuyingCooperative? becomes the trade firm. The BuyingCooperative? creates all of the infrastructure that the buyers need to receive what they want to buy. However, the BuyingCooperative? is owned by the buyers, and they are able to see exactly where all of the money goes to. The BuyingCooperative? also cuts out a lot of the fat and waste of current markets, and makes sure that a hugely increased volume of money goes to the people that produce the product. – SamRose

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2007-03-24 Face

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Check out this blog post on Openbusiness.cc describing our project here

Invitation to Open Business Community

This is an invitation to the Openbusiness.cc community to contribute and use the Open Business Models WikiHive. Especially those interested in the development of RevenueSharingModels, and OpenSource software development for Open business applications.

OpenBusinessModels (OBM) WikiHive is an Open Project initiated by Michigan, USA based Social Synergy inc., founded by Social Entrepreneur Sam Rose. The purpose of OpenBusinessModels WikiHive is: to explore, build, and test models and theory of the dynamics of business, and exchanges of value around Open Content, Open Source software, and Commons and Knowledge Commons based products, services, and economies. One of the core goals of OpenBusinessModelsWikiHive is to assist and enable the Passionate User. This Wiki Hive also acts as a development space for OpenBusinessModel and Open Content project proposals.The main wiki in the hive exists to is to act as a central seeding and support MotherWiki for this Wiki Hive. It is also intended to be a staging area for launching of other wikis, and a central Theory Building space, and Knowledge Commons for OpenBusinessModel(s) based around Open Content, Open Theory, Open Knowledge, Trust Metric, Open Value Network, Collective ProblemSolving, enabling the Passionate User, and more.

The general idea is to:

• Brainstorm and Research
• Build and test infrastructure and best practices in real world Open Business Model applications.

This is Testing Theory Through Action.

Why A Wiki Hive?

First of all, a WikiHive is:

• A set of loosely-to-closely connected wikis that usually all reside on one webserver. For more information, see ObmWikiHiveStructure. (It is easy to migrate a wiki out of the hive, if desired.)
• A space that allows instant wiki creation. (See: ObmWikiCenterEn:CreateANewObmWiki for more info).
• Usually based around Wiki Net principles, using Near Links, Inter Wiki links, Sister Sites (see the bottom of any page for the same page on other sites), and other InterCommunity? tools. This helps create and coordinate a Knowledge Commons based on TrustedLinkLanguage, and a KnowledgeCollective? of people who share similar interests.

Our wikihive is based on the OddMuse wiki engine, free and open source program that has evolved from the original WikiWikiWeb code base. In general, using a wiki can help sort through long and often confusing email exchanges, by getting everyone on the same page. We frequently use it to summarize long threaded discussions into one page that is easily digestable, and reusable.

Current Projects

Extinction Level Event

One of our first projects is a 3D animated movie project called Extinction Level Event (XTIN), the home page and blog for the project, with storyline and example art work can be found here. Open Business Models Wiki Hive is collaborating with XTIN in creating a Revenue Sharing Model for the XTIN project. We are using a system of points that equal shares of revenue, for tasks that project participants take on and complete. Revenue will come from sales of items like posters, and the movie itself.

Currently these points are tracked in wikiCalc, an open source web based spreadsheet program created by the inventor of VisiCalc, Dan Bricklin. The project points are calculated into percentages of revenue in the spreadsheet. Then, this can be exported to PayPal’s Mass Pay function, to pay all of the participants at once, each time revenue is earned.

P2P Money

The development of the Extinction Level Event revenue sharing model also led in part to the emergence of another project, a partnership between BarCampBank and Open Business Models WikiHive to create a tool that can automate both the paying of money in Revenue Sharing Models, and the pooling of money for sharing group expenses. Our goal is to develop an Open Source tool that can be used both for tracking and projecting expenses, pooling money/fundraising for groups, that can pay vendors and receive revenue from resellers, and that can distribute money out to project participants. A one page description can be found on the BarCampBank wiki at: P2P Money and at Opeb Business Models Wiki Hive at CoDevProposal

Sloganeer

• Sloganeer is a project initiated by Rob Labossiere.
• Sloganeer is an application that allows you to post your organization’s name and invite people to create slogans that reflect on its identity, issues or experiences related to that identity. Sloganeer is a way to play, explore, twist, add to, divert, enhance… in a word, build the collective meaning of your organization.
• Sloganeer is also a feedback and consensus building tool. Gather commentary, thoughts, criticism — public feedback or input into your project, goals and methods.

We are using wiki for exploring how this idea of sloganeering and a sloganeering app. might be realized/produced, manifested in

• organization or business
• product or process
• promotion or network

Rob did some research into participatory web projects that have Business Models.

We are working on the Business Model.

Sloganeer, full of multiple contributions from multiple contributors will have to deal with Copyright Concerns.

To produce collectively something that is productive financially, means we will have to have some ideas about Revenue Sharing.

All Are Welcome

Anyone interested is welcome to participate in Open Business Models WikiHive. Please check out Welcome Visitors and feel free to leave feedback in our discussion area. If your open business project needs a wiki, and you’d like to benefit from and add to our community and Knowledge Commons, please have a look at the page front / blog for info about how to create a wiki in this hive. You may choose whatever license you are comfortable with for your project, all content is otherwise Creative Commons BYSA 2.5 by default.

Discuss This-Click here!

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2007-03-19 Face

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I found this on Ted Rheingold's blog:

Amazing to think about, especially for SecondLife 3D design.

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2007-03-07 Face

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Attracting and Enabling PassionateUsers

I’ve been a PassionateUser of web applications and VirtualCommunity for a long time.

I am going to declare here and now, that one of the core goals of OpenBusinessModelsWikiHive is to attract and enable the PassionateUser. I think that the OpenBusinessModel is one of the best emerging ways to do this. Developing your plans and ideas in the open, and giving your community the opportunity to give feedback, and trying to DevolvePower to the users as much as possible.

Not only are we interested in attracting and enabling the PassionateUser, we’re also interested in expanding the “average” number of people who can be counted as a PassionateUser.

If The average number of PassionateUsers is around 1%, then maybe we can make it easier for more people to become a PassionateUser.

So, how does someone increase the number of people counted as PassionateUser?

This is a question that I feel is best answered by the people who will fill the role of PassionateUser in each unique circumstance. These people should be involved early on in the creation and planning and building processes. Therefore, be open to changing, experimenting, and making small corrections over time. Let community have a permanent role in the evolution of your products and services.

I’m moving this to a page here, titled PassionateUser. Please don’t hesitate to help me evolve it more there. – SamRose

Related Pages and Resources

Blogs

Creating Passionate Users Blog Horsecowpig blog Product Wiki Blog Mass Customization blog

Wikis and Wiki Pages

DevolvePower PinkoMarketing EnablingCreativity CommunityRoles

Books

DemocratizingInnovation? (ISBN:0262720477)

Discuss This

tags: passionate user, pinkomarketing,virtual community, openbusinessmodels

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2007-03-04 Face

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HighTrafficWiki

This is froma contribution to Community:HighTrafficWiki

Web Proxy

Squid cache

Wikipedia has been dealing with problem via Wikipedia:Squid_cache, which distributes the serving end of things, anyway.

Grid Server

Media Temple gridserver

GridServer supposedly can handle high traffic much better than traditional VPS. Exampelof OddMuse wiki running on Gridserver: http://s4560.gridserver.com/cgi-bin/wiki2/FrontPage

Improvements to traditional single servers

Lighthttpd ("lighty") and fastcgi

(for Perl and Python based wiki engines)

Some wiki admins have reported better results by using "lighty" instead of ApacheWebServer?. "lighty" includes FastCGI.

The advantage to using "lighty" & FastCGI is:

• Smallish nature of "lighty"
• MultiPlexing? of FastCGI, so that a new process is not created for every webserver request.

Sheep Art is reported to run on "lighty" & FastCGI. A comparison of Apache benchmarking with OBM Wiki which currently runs on traditional CGI and Apache2 webserver, shows that Sheep Art serves multiple requests over time almost twice as fast as OBM Wiki, probably due in large part to "lighty" & FastCGI, since tests were run on both very old/low memory and more modern machines running "lighty" & FastCGI, vs CGI and Apache2.

There is also mod_fastcgi for Apache.

Distributing Wiki

I’ve listed some ideas on 2007-02-08.

Ultra Monkey?

At this time, I don’t know of any successful implementations of distributing wiki across servers. UltraMonkey may hold some possibilities, but something still needs to synchronize the application across servers.

GridOs Ideas

Emerging technology is addressing distribution by creating a GridOs?.

Examples:

• 3Tera
• GridServer
• Amazon ec2 beta

This technology seems to be momentarily out of reach for us mere mortals, however. I have not found any OpenSource software projects that have come anywhere near this (yet).

Discussion

Discussion on 2007-03-04 Blog

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2007-03-01 Face

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MicroBooks

Thinking today about Shearer:Micro_Books idea.

This is one of the great reasons to create content in a community, or networks of communities with the CCBYSA license.

If you have an evironment of trust you can pool knowledge, and let people who are OccasionalContributor or CommunityMember participants Re-assemble the content into useful MicroBook content. They could then take, say 60% of the profit. Then distribute 30% to the actual authors of the pages they used, if any. Then, 10% to a community fund, which would then pay out dividends, like shares.

Editing, Layout, Publishing, Distribution

Editing would be the job of the MicroBook Intitiators.

Layout can be accomplished with am excelent OpenSource application called Scribus.

Publishing/printing can be accomplished either through traditional book printing and binding providers, or could be done through PrintOnDemand services, such as LuLu. LuLu also handles distribution. If publishing through traditional printers, there are still many options for automating distribution.

Primary Market

The primary market for MicroBook content is likely not traditional book store customers. Rather, this is more of a LongTail market, with many possible niches.

It is possible to market through Amazon.com, or other online marketplaces, and yet still work with PrintOnDemand printing technology providers.

One scenario is that you could list many micro books, along with desireable anthologies of MicroBooks?, or a customer could build their own book out of many micro books.

The Shearer:Micro_Books model also suggests that specialty custom markets are possible.

See Also

NewBookEconomy OnDemandPublishing Paper_Wiki_Documentation (settign an OddMuse wiki up to create an academic paper format)

Useful Open Source Software

OddMuse MoinMoin DokuWiki MediaWiki Scribus? InkScape

Discussion

Discuss MicroBooks.

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2007-02-24 Face

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The Future Of Open Business

Intro

Open Business.cc blog reports about a Time Magazine article titled “Getting Rich Off Those Who Work For Free”.

The Time article is about the GiftEconomy:

• People who are creating OpenSource Software on a volunteer basis
• People who are creating content for OpenContent publications, like Wikipedia
• People who’s activity is the business model in for-profit ventures, like YoutTube?, MySpace, etc

An earlier oct 2006 Open Business.cc blog post also discussed the open quesitons surrounding this:

“What are the principles for relying on users to build a money-generating business? Or, in more provocative terms, when does user-generated content - at $90 per screen name - become a new form of exploitation? Alternatively, one could argue that users are compensated with a good; a “free” service in return for their data and attention.

“What are the necessary tenets of this new class of software and software company? What is the difference between “open”, “free”, and “commercial” – and how do they interact?”

Trying to fit the emerging future into the structure of the past

Let’s face it, it’s hard to see through the fog of the future, and “predict” what direction OpenSource, UserGeneratedContent?, and OpenContent activities will go in.

Dear Economists trying to figure out what is happening online…

…Welcome to the wonderful worlds of the ForesightPrinciple, and MediaEcology!

A big reason why it is hard to see how the “GiftEconomy” is going to play out, is that we humans often use the past as a model for the future. When new technologies, mediums and systems emerge, we usually immediately try to adapt them to the ways in which we are already doing things. (see: MarshallMcLuhan).

Wikipedia:Richard_A._Slaughter took the quote from MarshallMcLuhan that “We look at the present through a rear view mirror” and applied the metaphor to Wikipedia:Futures_studies

image source

NeilPostman? had FiveIdeas about technology. Idea number 3 was that “every technology has a philosophy which is given expression in how the technology makes people use their minds, in what it makes us do with our bodies, in how it codifies the world, in which of our senses it amplifies, in which of our emotional and intellectual tendencies it disregards.”

NeilPostman? means with idea number 3 that “To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

We want to look at the emerging network cultures through the lenses of the production-based economies of the past 100+ years, and their Hierarchically-organized social structures. This is why we even bother calling them a GiftEconomy at all. (LionKimbro already made this point in RethinkingCredit in CommunityWiki). But, these socio-cultural emergences are not really a “GiftEconomy” at all.

Instead, if they are any kind of “economy” at all, they are more likely what my friend HowardRheingold calls a “SharingEconomy”.

People Voluntarily Sharing. But why? Because they are reciprocated some kind of value.

Now, sometimes people think thety are “voluntarily sharing”, but really they are being exploited, and that is what NeilPostman? talked about with his Idea number 2:”(in technological change) there are always winners and losers, and that the winners always try to persuade the losers that they are really winners.”

Now, it doesn’t have to happen that way, but it often does. Which brings us to…

Embracing The Future For What It Is Becoming

So, if we try to understand that people are voluntarily sharing for perceived reciprocated value, then we can start to think about the direction this is really going in:

People will share and trust more, when they are reciprocated with more real value

If you try to go the route of Neil’s Idea number 2, you’ll get busted eventually, and people will start moving away from you, and towards where the perceived real reciprocated value is. The scams are going to get harder to pull as control shifts more towards the users, away from the providers/enablers. So, in the SharingEconomy, share the value with people sharing with you, because they don’t have to share with you. Share the revenue, the control. It is time to see that even feedback and input can be considered as valuable voluntary sharing, and should be reciprocated with a reward of listening to the feedback and incorporating it into the system. These voluntary sharers can increasingly exercise their RightToLeave.

The future of the SharingEconomy is...

…Sharing.

Multi-way sharing, between all of the parties involved.

of course, no future is guaranteed. We can easily get locked into a culture dominated by centuries-long ruts of walled-off economies, if people continue to design to try and take advantage of Idea number 2 and make a quick buck at the expense of long-term quality.

However, I don’t personally think people are going to be fooled so easily. And, I think that the “market” will eventually drive people towards creators and providers and facilitators who really start to think about “How can I reciprocate back real value to these people who are sharing with me?”

tags: openbusiness,socialsynergy,sharingeconomies,mediaecology,foresight, opensource,opencontent

Discussion

Click This Link to Discuss This

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2007-02-16 Face

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MeasuringCommunityHealth

At Ma.gnolia the Citizen Agency is putting together what they describe as:

“Bookmarks for case studies, measurement studies, communications/social theory on measuring the health of communities. (Sorry…moderated for keeping ourselves organized. a project by Citizen Agency please email us if you would like to get involved)”

After a few conversations with TaraHunt, I joined their research effort. This was also discussed a while back on BarCamp:MeasuringTheSuccessOfCommunities. One defining example to give you an idea of the general direction of these concepts can be found at Wikipedia:Genuine_Progress_Indicator (GPI)

GPI is an argument to take more vectors into account than just industrial production and economic metrics, to measure the health of a society. Replacing the old industrial era Wikipedia:Gross_domestic_product (GDP), with Wikipedia:Genuine_Progress_Indicator (GPI)

I started digging through my archives, and tagging everything I have that is related with "mch". While looking back over all of he links and articles that I had read and saved over the past couple of years on this general subject, I realized a couple of things:

• There is are many conceptualizations of what “progress” is. (this is why we live in a world where some people are calling for a GPI, while others are perfectly content with the GDP).
• Many people are stuck with ways of MeasuringHealthyCommunities that do not resonate with their world view, or that are too narrow in scope. These ways of MeasuringHealthyCommunities come from governments and institutions, and are usually relayed by broadcast media. They are often built out of sources of data that are not easily or cheaply accessible or useable-re-useable by the majority of people. These also give very little freedom for people to add their own vectors or factors, based on their unique local conditions of existence.

This also raised some questions for me:

1. What are the (nearly) universal factors for “Genuine progress” and “community Health”?
2. How can average people, with preferably OpenSource technology, measure and use these factors?

For question 1, I am looking at larger “meta” factors, like:

• Environment
• Economy
• BioPsychoSocial? Health
• Litercies (Education)
• Social Equity (freedom, justice, democracy)

Then, I am thinking about “sub” factors:

• Environment
  • Air Quality
  • Water Quality
  • Ecosystem Health
  • Pollution
  • Etc
• Economy
  • advancing wages
  • wealth disparities
• BioPsychoSocial? Health
  • Disease
  • Mortality rates
  • Infant mortality
  • access to healthcare
  • etc
• Litercies (Education)
  • Media Literacy
  • Personal Finance Literacy
  • Literacy of History
  • Literacy of Foresight
  • Local/regional economics literacies and transparency
• Social Equity
  • freedom
  • justice
  • democracy
  • equality

Then, I am thinking about:

1. How these factors and subfactors are currently measured
2. How to use OpenSource technology and open standards to create a decentralized way for people to measure and create databases of these factors and subfactors. Also, allowing people to decide which factors and subfactors are important to them.
3. How to allow these factors and subfators to feed-back to communities in ways that let them easily see a useable and accurate community health/success/progress representation.

So, this is an OpenTheory brainstorming of this, just to jot some ideas down, and hopefuly get some feedback. Expect that this will probably change. I mostly just wanted to get this out of my head while it was still fresh in there. – SamRose

tags: measuring community health, community indicators, Genuine Progress Indicator, GPI, citizen agency, social synergy, measuring healthy communities

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2007-02-15 Face

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(from a discussion at MicroTasks)

WikiAgreement:Introduction

Shareholder agreements are one of the big “great divide” areas that I need to address with OpenBusinessModel Revenue Sharing agreements (shareholder agreements). At least in some cases. Especially those projects that involve production of a product intended to be sold, and revenue split.

The idea that I have is (putting this into a sort of DocumentMode for possible re-use later here and elsewhere):

WikiAgreement

Once an organization or group decides to come to an agreement, that group can co-author a draft of their agreement transparently in Wiki, online, if they are developing an OpenBusinessModel (or in a private password protected wiki if necassary).

ConversationProcess

ConversationProcess applies to drafting a WikiAgreement. The process of transferring theories (TheoryBuilding) into DocumentMode “clear thesis” pages, and summarizing conversations into easy to read documents.

Voting

Voting can also be part of the ConversationProcess in WikiAgreement. A process such as TedErnst’s and BrandonCsSander?’s BeyondYes gives a groundwork for merging ConversationProcess with WikiAgreement.

Traditional Agreement Phases

One of the possibilities among some communities, and networks of communities is a remixing of the traditional “phases” of development of ideas.

For instance, a traditional set of phases for creating an agreement might have been something like:

In WikiAgreementProcess?(es), and OpenBusinessModel applications, you can often throw out the NDA. And, you can ++merge processes and phases++. For instance, all three “traditional” phases above can possibly be merged, and hypothesis testing can be an ongoing sub-process. So can feedback, and TheoryBuilding, and creation of KnowledgeCommons, in OpenBusiness applications.

WikiAgreementProcess

WikiAgreementProcess? rolls together many different potential processes, and traditional phases of organizational/business development. There is no one universal recipe, but rather a sort of “toolkit” of many potentially useful “sub”-processes.

Also, interested in ForeignExchange? systems in relation to RevenueSharingModel applications. I was thinking more about this the other day, and I started to think about not-so-apparent possibilities with AlternativeCurrency. Especially in the realm of partneship between many different groups. A lot of people are skeptical about AlternativeCurrency. But, I think that slepticism mostly comes from not seeing many examples of successful use of AlternativeCurrency, or always thinking about it’s direct 1:1 relationship with traditional “hard” currency. AlternativeCurrency may also be exchanged for other “value”, like time, or even resources, among networks of people.

For instance, you could set up a PredictionMarket, and use the an AlternativeCurrency in the PredictionMarket, but people could take that currency and use it with other businesses and groups who benefit from the PredictionMarket.

tags: predictionmarket, openbusiness, alternativecurrency, revenuesharingmodel, communitywiki, hanswobbe, samrose, wikiagreement, conversationprocess, beyondyes

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2007-02-11 Face

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WikiHiveBusinessModel

One of the ideas that I am exploring is an actual WikiHiveBusinessModel:

• Setting up and optimizing a WikiHive for a group, project school, organizations, communities.
  • Hosting and administering the WikiHive.
• Teaching people how to use the WikiHive effectively, how to create a KnowledgeCommons with a WikiHive as it’s core. Effectively incorporating the WikiHive into other knowledge, community, networking, and personal productivity tools.

Open Questions

• Is OddMuse software in it’s current state ready for this type of application? (I plan on creating a Wiki in this WikiHive that will be used for brainstorming, and developing OddMuse for OpenBusinessModel applications).

Possible OddMuse Developments for OpenBusinessModel Applications

• Incorporating PinkoMarketing and community bloggingtools. Emulating or improving on http://spreadfirefox.com model. Voting mechanisms via Perl scripts
• RevenueSharingModel manangement. Incorporate OpenID URL as an option for UserName, to automate Knowledge work/contribution tracking.
• Analyze OddMuse fitness for heavy traffic applications, Spam countermeasures, bot countermeasures.
• Supporting MicroFormat development in OddMuse
• WikiCalc TransClusion
• OddmuseToInkscape development
• TransClusion of Video and Audio content
• GnuPlot? development

This package of tools could also eventually be incorporated into the CommunicationsTower project.

tags: openbusiness, wiki, wikihive, wikinet, wikicalc, microformats, pinkomarketing, communitymarketing, valuenetwork, oddmuse, opensource, gnuplot, bliki, blogging, inkscape, openid, rel-payment, communicationstower, server benchmarking, socialsynergy

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2007-02-04 Face

obm-wiki-hive: face
[en]

Technorati Profile

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2007-02-01 Face

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Preface

The idea presented in this blog posting was something that I offered originally to the BarCampBank project. Although people intitially expressed enthusiastic interest, the nuaunces of the idea did not seem to resonate enough to gain traction within that group.

The idea initially spawned P2PVenture at the BarCampBank wiki site.

However, the direction of P2PVenture is starting to diverge from the direction of the ideas presented here and here.

The concepts come from ideas expressed from both the CommunityWikiBank idea and notes at SocialSynergy:PeerInvest

OpenValueNetwork EquityPool

As discussed in BarCamp:BarCampBankFlashMeeting1 with BarCamp:OriPekelman, the idea here is to create a version of the Solari model. We could modify the Solari model to create a PeerInvest Cooperative model. One difference from Solari is that, this structure could be based on a network of people, and not necassarily based on a location, although location-based cooperatives are also an option in this model. The Cooperative can help groups with Solari-concept services like ConsumerAggregation? support, SmallBusinessIncubation?, “back office” and PinkoMarketing support, as well as support in implementing open business models, helping other groups in creating effective knowledge commons via wiki, and WikiNet concepts, and other social software tools, information visualization, trust and value metrics, PinkoMarketing and CommunityMarketing, and more.

The structure would define all OpenValueNetwork members as cooperative “A” shareholders. This means that they have a vote when our Cooperative articles say that a vote is needed for decision making. Yet, at the same time, we try to DevolvePower in our network so that most decision making is done through ConsensusGroup when possible. When voting is needed, we can look at models like BeyondYes. Also, this governance discussion is of course open to everyone else’s input. If they leave, they sell their “A” share back to the group based on nominal value.

The cooperative can then create “B” shares that are based on equity pools that we collectively create and manage. (We can always change the what we name the shares, this is to demonstrate the concept). These “B” shares could be issued used to raise money when we have helped to build something up to the point that the network believes it is ready to be funded. The network would build it up by:

• Attracting people who have ideas with potential .
• combining our talents to help them accelerate research of the existing opportunities, market conditions and potential markets, open business model opportunities.
• Use this research to help them implement ways for them to put into place the infrastructure needed, with as little overhead/upfront cost as possible. And attract and seek out communities of users/customers, and to foster an open value network around their activities and connections.

The network would develop a version of ProjectScreening that works with OpenBusinessModel principles. We would do this research and building up of infrastructure in open and transparent ways whenever possible. We can then serve as a more transparent venture captalist/angel investor, to help the start-up group avoid the traditional VentureCapital? routes, by first helping them build up their enteprise/idea, then acting as an intermediary to help them fund the idea once we help them prove that it can work and generate revenue on it’s own. We issue “B” shares on behalf of the start up, and we seek investment in proven ideas. Then we pay ourselves for the work we have put into this based on a percentage of the “B” shares sold. Each person from our network who has contributed work on ech project can opt to receive a predetermined payment amount, or payment in the form of “B” shares that they can sell later.

Real World Examples

Education Investment vs. Eduaction Loans

http://biz.yahoo.com/usnews/061207/061206_a_venture_capital_alternative.html

An idea to replace University/College education loans with an investment that repays based on a percentage of revenue earned in a career. The article above also discusses that a professor here in Michigan, at Hillsdale College (Gary Wolfram) points his CATO institute Study that describes how these contracts can be pooled into an equity fund to lower risk across many students. (One of the few times I’ve personally agreed with CATO Institute).

This idea will be developed more on a local page titled PeerInvest, then moved to it’s own Wiki in this WikiHive.

Discuss this

Tags:barcampbank, peerinvest, microfinance, openbusiness

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