Sohodojo’s Omidyar.net Blog

Christina, this is a vital and most interesting topic. We are ruminating on your specific ideas and provocative questions and will respond accordingly.In the meantime, we’d like to bring folks’ attention to this piece, What Tom Sawyer Knew, our recent contribution to the MicroFinance Marketplace conversation. This piece is probably more appropriate to this conversation than the MFM project-specific conversation where it was originally posted.

In particular, consider closely this referenced article, ‘Second Life’ membership now free. The last paragraph is particularly suggestive (see sidebar, our emphasis added).

Heck, if we can’t get creative and provide an community-rich on-line experience that rivals or surpasses an imaginary virtual world, then we should hang up our social entreprenurial shoes and head for the Old Folks Home.

In other words, forget about ROI, sell experience!

This discussion fits squarely in Sohodojo’s interest in the reinvention of consumerism to what we’ve called inprosumerism, that is, the experience-based involvement of the empowered Individual to participate in the full cycle of investment, production and consumption rather than being a bottomless sucking ashcan at the end of a product-pushing supply chain.

Here’s a link to our ONet blog’s Inprosumer category page where the individual blog posts contain links back to their source ONet conversations.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Christina, this is a vital and most interesting topic. We are ruminating on your specific ideas and provocative questions and will respond accordingly.In the meantime, we’d like to bring folks’ attention to this piece, What Tom Sawyer Knew, our recent contribution to the MicroFinance Marketplace conversation. This piece is probably more appropriate to this conversation than the MFM project-specific conversation where it was originally posted.

In particular, consider closely this referenced article, ‘Second Life’ membership now free. The last paragraph is particularly suggestive (see sidebar, our emphasis added).

Heck, if we can’t get creative and provide an community-rich on-line experience that rivals or surpasses an imaginary virtual world, then we should hang up our social entreprenurial shoes and head for the Old Folks Home.

In other words, forget about ROI, sell experience!

This discussion fits squarely in Sohodojo’s interest in the reinvention of consumerism to what we’ve called inprosumerism, that is, the experience-based involvement of the empowered Individual to participate in the full cycle of investment, production and consumption rather than being a bottomless sucking ashcan at the end of a product-pushing supply chain.

Here’s a link to our ONet blog’s Inprosumer category page where the individual blog posts contain links back to their source ONet conversations.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–