Originally posted to sCNN – the smallChangeNewsNetwork
you know the ideas are coming fast and fresh when there’s just no time for capitalization! maybe something of a structure for the GivingMarket is starting to emerge here now. something that is fully grounded in teh swarm of personal relationships that is essential for getting anything to look and feel real — and also something that can scale into a single central, identifiable even if only by its swarming, market place for transactions.
imagine that what we’ve previously called /ProfilePage and /ProjectPage merge into a single blog page. the answers to our /StrategicGivingQuestions the other night make for an easy first dozen postings. and if everyone answers those first, then they’re always findable in the first archive page. or you put them right in the sidebar. either way, or some other way, they are invited and posted as introduction, initial offering and request: what we have and what we need, what we want to see in the world and what we are willing to do about it. add a personal sidebar to each blog with a personal blogroll of the orgs, individuals, referrals, contributors, and other projects you’re interested, even the news feeds from the sources that are relevent to your project. finish the page with photos and contact information and you have a complete GivingMarket participant.
next, notice that there are many such projects, with have/need info posted. so make a central registry of some sort. register yourself and all the others. self-selected. self-managed. self-organizing. NOW is that central list a chicagobloggers website? is it simply a central blogroll that everyone can also add to their sidebar? but how would one trim what should get to be /OneBigBlogRoll? and how would new entries come onto established lists, or rather how would they be presented to all market participants to be considered for addition/deletion to/from their slice of the central GivingMarket blogroll?
if we leave the blogroll function to the manual operation of each participant, then maybe the way to bring new potential blogroll folks to the attention of all participants is a super/central blog of blogs? so maybe the central registration is a posting in that blog of giving blogs and also is adding yourself to the central bloglines news aggregator feed lot? blogs could be dumped into piles there: youth, arts, food, environment, social venture, etc.?
the trick it seems is to cobble together the simplest possible system of some of the most popular tools, then get 50-100 folks to pilot the thing. if the pilot succeeds, it’s either copied or cultivated. it gets larger or it repeats itself. maybe a bit of both.
the initial offering and invitation within any one group, like a BALLE-BC would include orientation to the following: a blogger template, blogroll subscription, bloglines subscription, a paypal account, technorati (for seeing who’s quoting you, so you can respond)… perhaps a meet-up subscription, though they play gatekeeper and restrict access to forming new groups… but perhaps there’s a yahoogroups email group subscription tossed in… and maybe an Open Space Technology or /InvitingFriendsAndPartners primer.
the whole thing is ultimately held together by PURPOSE, which is why there needs to be a convener or convening organization like a BALLE-BC. so perhaps there is one bloglines super account, and many groups each with their own purpose, invitation, blogroll, and blog of blogs, and bloglines folder? maybe this ends up being a sort of wiki tree of blogtools.
a bit of work to set up, and then… pow! it’s a thing. easy, fast, free and replicable. now, where’s the revenue model inside of that swarm? could there ever be anyway to own even a fraction of the transactions, or is the whole thing lost to the network right out the gate?
technorati: sCNN | SmallChangeNews