Sohodojo’s Omidyar.net Blog

The Importance of an Earnest On-line Small Is Good World Marketplace

John Berger said:

[snip] So, my recommendation is: while it is great to think about franchise and growth plans, the most important thing to do is to get the first NED shop up and running. The business plan should be 90% about the first store and only 10% about the future plans. Also, while it is great to hope that you have record setting margins and sales, you need to establish the business so that it will survive or even prosper if the results are far below your dreams.

Hello, John. Welcome to the NED thread. While your post was full of practical insights, we singled out (and added a bit of emphasis to) the above bit because we 200% concur with your recommendation.

As we move to the Flat World of collaborative networks of empowered individuals, the world of business will become less organization-centric. For NED to be a successful and sustainable 21st Century business venture, we believe it will be realized as an entrepreneurial community ecosystem. Its many piece-parts may reflect any number of organizing models as expressed in the various legal entity types available.

Each collaborative network/ecosystem partner will have a number of decisions to make about how they organize, fund their start up and initial participation, and behave within this collective enterprise. There will be no One Right Way to structure, fund, and manage/influence a network partner.

The franchise aspect of the current NED discussion is interesting from a “what NED might look like” standpoint. But this portion of the discussion is certainly not what has drawn us to, nor what sustains our interest, in the collective NED envisioning. It is very likely that the franchise model will be too constraining, particularly given the regulatory and financing constraints you mentioned.

The same “square peg, round hole” problem will limit the utility of the nonagricultural co-op model. Co-op regulatory requirements different from U.S. state to state, and nation to nation. In addition, co-ops are often constrained from retaining earnings and so are not suitable if a goal of NED is to provide a “sweat equity” means for network/ecosystem members from marginalized communities to participate in true shared wealth production.

We can’t help but think that NED, once realized, will be much more organic and dynamic than can be described by any existing single business organization model.

One thing we are sure of is that no matter what form the various piece-parts of the NED Network take on, an Internet software-based ‘nervous system’ and marketplace ‘construction set’ will be a vital component of the network’s success.

eBay’s breakthrough innovation was due, in no small way, to it being a very lightweight (in terms of human resources) business organization powered by some clever software that tapped the emerging potential of the Internet as market-making infrastructure. If NED can be imagined as the ‘next eBay‘, then most certainly a core of some clever and appropriate software will be vital to its success.

So, based on John’s insightful recommendation, when we think about the 90% focus for that first NED store, we believe that it should be an eCommerce store/marketplace rather than a bricks and mortar establishment. The primary goal of this initial on-line marketplace should be to provide a highly engaging proof of concept of the proposed marketplace and supply/value chain dynamics. In addition, this portal/store should serve as an effective extranet facilitating prospective network/ecosystem member participation.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 30th, 2005

The Small Is Good World Marketplace and The Dream Society

Paul O’Hara said:

Jim and Timlynn said: * “The world desperately needs alternative markets that address the myriad of other behavioural motivators that contribute to health and happiness”

Thanks Jim and Timlynn for bringing the price debate so far forward. Couldn’t agree more.

You are welcome, Paul. And thank you for contributing such a thoughtful and “spot on” reply.

â??The heart has its reasons that reason does not knowâ?� Pascal

He’s so right. Pop forward a few centuries and you’ll find this same sentiment reflected in Danish futurist Rolf Jensen’s insightful book, The Dream Society, where he describes how we are becoming more Hunter-Gatherers of the Heart than Cultivators of the Mind. Jensen goes on to make a strong case for the emerging importance of story and emotion in marketing and organization ‘visioning’. We explore Jensen’s ideas further in Nanocorps in the Dream Society: How ‘Small is Good’ Business Webs Will Compete in the Story-driven Marketplaces of the 21st Century

“Happiness is when what one thinks, what one says, and what one does are in harmony” Ghandi

Again spot on, Paul. Notice what Gandhi doesn’t say… It isn’t about what you have, your stuff, that is important to a fulfilled, happy life. Madison Avenue would obviously consider Gandhi a dangerous person to be silenced if he was still around shaking things up.

If the three key purchasing drivers are price, quality and service and lowest price is not an option for an ethical retailer or the Small is Good market, then we must add equivalent or greater value back into the offer elsewhere.

Those three dimensions are adequate when you limit yourself to consumer purchase dynamics in the Big Is Good World. But we believe that Pascal, Ghandi, Jensen, and others are suggesting that there is much more to life that stuff consumption. Sure, price is important to a lot of folks. And, yes, they will pay more for appreciable quality. And service is worth paying for. But this still leaves a whole spectrum of Maslow-ian human needs to bring to the shopping experience. Paul, you go on to say…

Please consider Maslows Hierarchy of Needs … the human motivations which in turn drive our needs and eventually influence our behaviours. As we evolve up the hierarchy, I would hope that we will move away from todays ignorant and selfish pre-occupation with lowest price.

We’re on the same wavelength. Once we break the tight-coupling of price and product we can begin to transform the act of shopping into a diverse, interactive, impactful community- and world-changing experience that fulfills many human needs beyond our basic need for more stuff. When we start to realize this transformation, we will be on the road to Nedville which will be found somewhere in the emerging Small Is Good World.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 29th, 2005

The Small Is Good World Marketplace and Negroponte’s $100 computer

Mark Grimes said:

[snip] In other words, it needs to work on the $100 windup computer, so tech like Second Life is way out of the question for a few years. I’d love it if it could be done in Flash.

Both Christina and nmw hit the nail on the head… Flash simply does not meet your LCD criteria. The biggest issue being accessibility (not just disability-wise but cross-culturally) and bandwidth.

There are really two different LCDs to be met:

• Participant platform - minimum for a microenterprise supplier, community marketers, etc.
• On-line Shopper platform - minimum for a compelling story-driven, game-oriented shopping experience

As we discussed on our phone call, the LCD computer-based Participant platform should be the Nicholas Negroponte $100 laptop. (There also needs to be a ‘last mile’ participant platform that is not computer-based, but that is an issue for another conversation.)

The On-line Shopper platform is another issue entirely. While it is getting easier and easier to support multiple DDCs (device delivery channels), there still needs to be an LCD minimally acceptable platform. To our mind that means “modern” (but not cutting edge) HTML with CSS (cascading style sheets).

As we look at our various web site logs, the truly ancient browsers are disappearing. It used to be a significant challenge to write a static (or template-based dynamic) HTML page that could be rendered the same (or nearly so) in all the generation 3, 4, 5, etc. browsers. Even modest use of cascading stylesheets was problematic when there were so many browsers of so many evolutionary standards around.

Thankfully, we are moving beyond that Babel-onian era. There are a number of free, modern, full-featured, small-to-download web browsers that can handle a modern web page with CSS positioning and styles, etc. Add in optional Javascript and you would be amazed at how interactive your browsing experience can be.

So while exotic channels, such as SecondLife and Flash, may find a role to play in NED on-line commerce, we believe these channels must be optional supplements rather than a minimum entry requirement.

–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–

Add comment November 29th, 2005

Recipe for an Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystem

Christina (Kirabo the Gift Mom) Jordan said:

OK, you have my arms, legs and mind… What is our next concrete step?

Hi Christina!
As you may know, we had an extended ‘mind-meld’ telephone conversation with Mark on Saturday. The ‘tyranny’ post above is a direct result of that conversation. We want to start getting some NED Design Prepositions on the table that can drive our next concrete collaborative steps.

Although we haven’t firmed up plans specifically yet with Mark, we have an inkling that one immediate step we might take. We’d like to get directly involved with Mark in the design and development of the NED On-line prototype eCommerce web site he is working on to offer LiA crafts purchased from your WE Center folks not too long ago.

To back-fill the story of our readiness for this adventure, over the last several months we have had a contract development project that gave us an opportunity to dig deeply into Drupal, an Open Source content management platform. that has a unique and flexible eCommerce framework add-on. It is ideal for actively prototyping the story-driven and game-oriented ideas we have for Small Is Good World markets.

If we can work with Mark on this ‘front end’ aspect of the marketplace, then perhaps we can engage Toby Beresford of MicroAid.net to provide an opportunity identification, investment, and payment system that would tie Mark’s web store to your WE Center microenterprises.

If we were to ‘divide and conquer’ this agenda along the lines described here, we would be taking some Giant Steps toward birthing NED’s Small Is Good World entrepreneurial community ecosystem. Cool, eh! Just like we were talking about over beers in Oxford at the Skoll World Forum last March.

So bottom line, next steps look like some simple collaborative agreements to work together, and we have to put together a short and specific work and funding plan to make it fly.

Onward! The game’s afoot…

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 21st, 2005

Breaking the Tyranny of Price - A NED Design Proposition

Small Is Good World marketplaces must break the bonds of tight-coupling between price and product.

We referenced The Nanocorp Primer article, The Yin Yang of eCommerce Engines, in a prior post. One of the tables in this article encapsulates much of the content on this article:

An agora marketplace is a socioeconomic network that brings buyers and sellers together.

We are on this web site creatively collaborating on strategies to change the world largely due to the deep insight that the Omidyars had that resulted in their creation of eBay, the premiere example of an Internet-enabled agora marketplace.

Many believe that the very nature of an agora marketplace disintermediates the supply chain to drive relentlessly toward an optimum (low) price.

If this is the case, then NED and any other Small Is Good World marketplace is doomed.

Fortunately — and this is the message in the above table and, more fully, the article from which it is extracted — price does not have to be the ultimate driver of markets.

A Call to Arms… Legs… Minds

NED, as an example of the emerging Small Is Good World, is a call to arms to “Say it ain’t so!”

NED, which we might liken to the ‘Next eBay’, will be a multi-billion dollar enterprise. But this Next Big Thing, paradoxically, will be found in the Small Is Good World. And its form is much more likely to be an entrepreneurial community ecosystem rather than a corporation. This is why Mark naturally gravitated toward a franchise model for NED. But even the fanchise model is likely to be only a piece of this diverse network ecosystem.

To make the Small Is Good World real we will have to suspend disbelief so we can articulate and pursue business and marketplace design goals that seem hard to imagine in today’s world. NED is an ideal vision around which to collectively imagine this exciting new world and its alternative marketplaces… to imagine, and then to make it real.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 21st, 2005

Lights, Camera, Action!… Gulp.

nmw said:

Hi SJT,

I “watched” your slideshow and was impressed with the feel of it: It seemed to be both expert and simple at once. While following it, I often thought — gee, they could have done the audio more professionally.

Dear nmw,

We are ROTFL. You are so right about our audio track. We are not very experienced media ‘talent’. When we do a presentation live to other actual people, we are very comfortable and our presentation comes across natural. When we did this presentation this summer at the National Rural Entrepreneurial Gathering, it went great.

We did this streaming audio/slide show using Camtasia which was very easy to use. This was, in fact, our first use of it. It will take some additional experience to get natural in this context. There is something intimidating about pushing the ‘record’ button and doing a presentation into a microphone with no audience interaction.

We’ll probably get better at this as we have experience. The Camtasia software, however, is absolutely brilliant.

nmw continued:

Then again, I am also slightly irritated how big media will polish stuff (which teenagers probably don’t even realize they’re doing) — I mean, have you ever heard a person talk incessantly without taking a breath every now and then (of course I’m a big fan of Wynton Marsalis, but I really don’t think this is the type of communications that are “appropriate technology” ;D).

I would be very interested in more details, perhaps with mathematical examples. Also more explanation on the “games” business — because I don’t quite get this.

Thanks for asking. Yes, this is precisely the kind of content we want to share here in the NED workspace. And, too, you are right about the elusiveness of the ‘games’ dimension of the Small Is Good World eCommerce experience. This can, and should, take on as many forms as we see expressed in the broad domain of gaming. We’ll be sure to expand on this further.

Thanks for your helpful comments and questions,

–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–

Add comment November 18th, 2005

NED Meet Sohodojo, Sohodojo Meet NED

Mark Grimes said:

Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn

It’s not every day someone says I don’t go far enough out of the box…I think I love you.

He, he… back at you!

OK, you’ve put something very interesting out there, and here’s a thought back. At one stage the ad agency I owned had a humor based flash web site that had 2-4 million visitors a day, and just shy of one million double opt-in eamil users. Still have the email list (probably 50-60% good) and own the URL, it just needs to be plugged back in. With the right story-driven and game-oriented alternative markets multi-player game built, I could seed it with tens if not hundreds of thousands of players…instantly.

Gads.

Hey Mark,

Sure, eyeballs are good… good, for a kick-start. The true challenge of your proposal is not to squander them by presenting a less than engaging and ‘addictive’ user (shopping) experience.

It would be exciting and challenging to launch this site with a ‘best guess’ at what such an alternative shopping experience might be. But then the race is on, or the eyeballs won’t turn into engaged minds. We would need an aggressive applied research and development effort to tune and evolve this experience-oriented eCommerce site.

Lots of time and money has gone into refining marketing and sales strategies for the Big Is Good World (Globalization 2.0 corporations to use Friedman’s term). The success of your ad agency is certainly dependent on your knowledge of this domain. And lots of creativity has gone into refining game design. (Sure, there are lots of creative individuals in gaming. But fundamentally the computer gaming industry is the film industry of the 21st century feeding an increasingly small number of mega-scale game publishers.)

Precious little time and energy, however, has gone into researching and developing the theories and technologies that will buttress the marketplaces of the Small Is Good World (AKA Globalization 3.0, to reference Friedman’s flattened world of empowered individuals).

The Big Is Good World is never going to be the source of this applied research and development. We have to do it ourselves. And your proposed eCommerce site is an ideal ’sandbox’ in which to collaborate on contributions to this important work.

For our part, here’s what Sohodojo has to offer. It took us 2.5 years to get IRS approval of our 501(C)(3) status as an independent, non-profit applied R&D lab supporting solo and family-based entrepreneurs and their microenterprise networks in rural and distressed urban communities. It took that long because we had to get a precedent-setting decision in which the IRS worked to understand the nature of an entrepreneurial community ecosystem, and to understand Sohodojo’s role as an ‘outsourced’ R&D lab supporting this emerging class of new network enterprises.

Concurrently with working with the IRS, we developed Sohodojo’s Advisory Board to include ‘idea infection points’ into prestigious business schools, digital media programs, research centers for simulation/gaming technologies, and the Open Source community. We can bring these resources to the table, together with our own strong skills in software design and development.

The success of the G3 or Small Is Good World alternative marketplaces won’t just happen through good intentions of its developers nor through the participation of its initial like-minded customers. These marketplaces will succeed and be sustained by offering a more compelling, more rewarding (in more dimensions of need than just ‘more stuff’), and yes, more FUN alternative than competing markets that appeal primarily to a ‘more stuff = more happiness’ consumer purchase decision model.

What’s our next step?

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 18th, 2005

From Static Supply to Dynamic Impact Chains

Mark Grimes said:

I’m thinking the ned online catalogue will look a little something like this at the product level page.

I hope that the shopping cart software will allow for real-time inventory control, but we’ll see how that shapes up.

Product:	Sparkle Multicolored Necklace

Transparency Report

1:	Financial Breakdown:

Artisan: $1.08

LiA exporter: $0.92

Tixeon importer: $0.75

Better World Advertising: $1.12

Retailer: $2.88

Nonprofit distribution: $0.75

2:	SROI (social return on investment measurement): (ideas?)

Would like to also take something like 5-10% for an ever growing microfinance investment fund too, but that may have to be in future version of this.

Other ideas, thoughts, feedback…

Mark,

Your thinking is ’spot on’ as the Brits say, but we don’t think it goes far enough outside the box of what passes for the eCommerce shopping experience. Just like computer user interfaces are built on the obvious transfer metaphors of ‘desktops’, ‘folders’, ‘trash cans’, etc. So, too, are our notions of eCommerce constrained by transference metaphors of ‘catalogs’, ‘inventory’, and most notoriously, the ’shopping cart’.

There is no good reason — other than that folks will intuitively ‘get it’ — for constraining the on-line shopping experience to that of its real world physical counterpart. Not that these metaphors don’t work. Indeed, they are certainly useful when we are talking about commodity shopping where ease of access and lowest price are primary drivers. This is what we would call shopping in the Big Is Good World of nameless, faceless corporations and their product offerings.

But the Small Is Good World of commerce among empowered, collaborative individuals is completely different. Its alternative marketplaces are based on ‘Who, How, and Why” rather than ‘Who Much and Where’ (price and distribution channel control). That is why the Small Is Good World alternative markets will be story-driven and game-oriented.

Yes, there are elements of story in your prototype example above. But you are taking the concept of story to literally. It is not just the narrative tale of the artisan. And, yes, there is both a story and a gaming element in the Transparency Report. But again, this is all within the context of a static ‘catalog’ and a ’shopping cart’. These metaphors constrain the design of your shopping experience.

By way of analogy, think in terms of today’s on-line massively multi-player games such as ‘Guild Wars’, the ‘Sims On-line’, etc. Certainly there is some bit of traditional narrative employed in these games. But its use is most often ‘back story’ and optional. There is a very personal ’story’ being experienced by these game players. But this story is not at all explicit, nor limited to a narrative presentation. The ‘player’ is a character within the play world, and they actively participate in the story-forming of their very personal experience.

In this same sense, the story-driven and game-oriented alternative markets of the the Small Is Good World marketplaces need to be much more dynamically composable by the shopper/player rather than presented as a shopping cart catalog entry. In other words, that Transparency Report needs to be a breadcrumb trail of commerce impact points that the shopper/player actively story-forms through an interactive experience.

To go deeper with this idea, we encourage you to visit the Entrepreneurial Community Ecosystems page where you will find a link to an article, The Yin Yang of eCommerce Engines. Also, if you are interested, we have been working with a flexible, extensible Open Source Content Management System with a radically cool eCommerce framework acc-on that is an ideal candidate for building this kind of story-driven, game-oriented eCommerce platform.

–Sohodojo Jim and Timlynn–

Add comment November 17th, 2005

Progress on Forming the Small Is Good World Working Group

Lars, thank you so much for the congratulations and words of encouragement.

For those who might not know her Social Edge ‘handle’ (nickname), C Kirabo is none other than Ashoka Fellow Christina ‘Kirabo’ Jordan who folks know around O.net for her work developing the Life in Africa Network. Kirabo, meaning ‘gift’, is a name given to her by her friends in Uganda.

We are especially thrilled with the election result as we and Christina are kindred spirits, along with the father and son team of Toby and Richard Beresford of MicroAid.Net, and Pamela McLean of CawdNet and others who intend to get together at the Forum to launch the Small Is Good World Working Group.

We’ll have more to say about our trip to the Forum and the formation of the working group in the days ahead. For the moment, we’re going to relax a bit and savor the idea of heading to the Forum in three weeks!
Thanks again Lars. And thanks especially to anyone who took an interest in the delegate election at Social Edge, and who voted to send us and Christina as delegates.

–Sohodojo Timlynn and Jim–

Add comment March 8th, 2005

The Yin-Yang of e-Commerce Engines — eBay Paying It Forward

Sohodojo is an independent, non-profit applied R&D lab supporting solo and family-based entrepreneurs collaborating in microenterprise and small business networks. These networks live in the parallel Universe of the Small Is Good World. The function of the Small Is Good World is to act as a governor or moderator to the excesses of the Big Is Good World.

There are many potential entry points into the Small Is Good World. However, we’ve picked one article that we feel is particularly relevant to the focus of this group and to the ‘pay it forward’ dynamic that inspired the creation of the Omidyar Network.

We invite you to read ‘The Yin-Yang of e-Commerce Engines’. The subtitle of this article is ‘How Small is Good Business Webs Will Compete in the Story-driven Marketplaces of the 21st Century’. By way of a teaser, here are the opening paragraphs:

In the first installment of The Nanocorp Primer, we described the challenge of extending the ride on Spaceship Earth as that of finding an effective balance between Small is Good and Big is Good network organizing principles. Neither approach being right nor wrong, just different. Each fulfilling a value-proposition ensuring its survival.

Big is Good dominance throughout the Industrial Era economy has diverted attention from Small is Good economic network dynamics. Big is Good thinking, in other words, has become the ‘common sense’ of how we do business. This unquestioned assumption has given us a blindspot when it comes to designing the e-Commerce engines underlying our web-based business ventures….

We welcome your comments and questions in response to reading this article.

Add comment March 5th, 2005