Posts filed under 'NED - Philanthropic Franchise'
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–
November 18th, 2005
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–
November 18th, 2005
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
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–
November 17th, 2005
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